How to resolve local delivery and pickup issues for multiple locations on a plant store?

Technical Q&A
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Hello! I have 4 current locations. These locations are actually plant merchants that grow and sell their own plants on my plantbaby shopify store (kinda like etsy but for plants). When I test these scenarios, shopify breaks:

(1) User goes to checkout with 1 plant from one vendor/location, and 1 plant from another vendor location. User tries to checkout and selects local pickup. Shopify throws an error message and says they can’t do pickup (even though, behind the scenes, I move plants to a designated pickup on the backend).

(2) User goes to checkout with 1 plant from one vendor/location, and 1 plant from another vendor/location in their cart. User tries to checkout and selects local delivery. User is within delivery radius for both vendor/locations. Shopify throws an error message and says they can’t do delivery.

Current, workaround:

I update all vendor/locations to MY location so that whenever user selects plants from multiple locations no errors are thrown for both local delivery or pickup. Limitations with this workaround: (1) I have to manage all orders with customer and arrange pickup times, etc vs having the vendor/location being able to manage that, (2) For pickup, users always have to come to my address, even though one of the other vendor/locations might be more convenient for them.

What I’d like to do instead:

(1) In general, I want to use the locations in shopify as they are intended and update each vendor location back to THEIR address (vs. mine as the default for every product).

(2) For pickup: When users have products from multiple vendors/locations, I want users to be able to select which vendor/location they want to pickup from that is most convenient for them (vs. always having to use my default location like I do now so shopify won’t break). I want errors to stop whenever a user has multiple products in their carts from different locations.

(2) For local delivery: I want users to only be charged a flat delivery fee for a given order, regardless of whether they purchase products from multiple locations or not. Right now, I am small enough that if a user were to pick their location associated with at least one of the products they bought, I’d go round up the other products and get them to the designated pickup location for the customer behind the scenes.

Please HELP with this or I may have to “grow out of shopify” entirely. What can we do???

1 Like
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Hi, @plantbaby

Thanks for posting to the Community. I love your business model!

The reason the local pick-up is not working for your specific needs is that technically the products are not in stock at each given location. It is expected behavior to not provide a pick-up option if a product is not listed as stocked at a given location. While you’re moving the product in the back end after the purchase, it would require the product to be in stock in a specific location at the time of checkout for the local pick-up option to be triggered.

That being said, there is a slight workaround you can use, however it won’t be perfect and will require some manual work on your part.

What you can do is stock the products at all 4 locations. This will allow each customer to choose the location that is most convenient for them. However, you will need to correspond manually with your locations about what item needs to be moved where. This will also help with local delivery as it will only provide the set flat fee you choose.

Finally, to keep track of what item belongs to which warehouse, you can use SKUs. For example, any item in which the SKU starts with 1 would be for location 1, and so on. I would also suggest you maintain a master sheet in a CSV outside of Shopify so you can check where specific products are stocked as a fail-safe.

I hope this helps! In the meantime, as I’m a plant fanatic myself, I would love to take a look at your store to see what additional support I can provide. Feel free to provide your domain in your reply!

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Hello! Thank you for your quick reply. I will test this solution likely sometime next week and then come back on to disposition it out and respond again. We are https://plantbaby.io (right now we’re operating in Seattle WA area only). But, assume we starting tracking inventory in another city like Portland OR for example, got any insight how we’d go about having only local inventory showing for users when on the domain? We’re not interested in shipping plants (because they don’t like to be shipped!).

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Hi, @plantbaby

Thanks for the response.

I had a look through our app store, and tried to brainstorm a way to display regional inventory only, and was not successful. There are options to achieve this internationally, however, not by state or city.

While not ideal, you could duplicate the products that you also carry in Oregon, and have them listed under a separate collection. For example, in your store’s navigation, you could have a Washington parent collection and an Oregon parent collection. The issue would be it’s not foolproof, and a customer could accidentally add a Washington product to their cart and vice versa.

Additionally, you could reach out to a Shopify Expert to assist in developing a custom app for your business, however, this can become rather pricey.

In the meantime, I had a look at your site, and it’s looking great! I do have some recommendations, however. For example, although it can be a bit of work, I recommend making your product photos a bit more unified. At the moment the images all have different dimensions and backgrounds which can appear cluttered to the eye. The easiest way to clean this up is to use a background remover app! This means you don’t have to take new photos, you just need to resize and remove the background of the images you currently use.

If you want more suggestions, please let me know!

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Hey @plantbaby ,
I was analyzing the same issue for the shop that I’m setting up right now. Did you find a solution that works for you now?

Hope to hear from you soon.
Kind regards
Jens