Shopify Locations and impact of negative inventory levels on sales

Technical Q&A
1

Hi,

We’re currently using Shopify Locations and have an integration through a third-party middleware to an EPoS (Lightspeed.) As it stands, orders which can’t be fulfilled in whole from a single Location are held at the middleware stage and have to be routed to a store manually.

We’re looking at getting this changed so that we are able to force these ‘split’ orders into a single, preferred Location which will press the inventory for that stock item to a negative level.

Will this still allow the stock item to be sold from the other locations if the global inventory level for that item is at 0?

Example:

  1. Stock item inventory in Location A is 0. Inventory in Location B is 1. (Global level is 1)
  2. Order comes in and is forced through to Location A.
  3. Stock item inventory in Location A is -1. Inventory in Location B is 1. (Global level is 0)
  4. Will Shopify still allow sales of the stock item (as Location B has a positive inventory level), or will it prevent sales as the ‘global’ inventory level is 0?

I look forward to hearing from you.

Kind regards,

2 Likes
2

I have a client on Lightspeed and Shopify Plus in a similar situation with Accumula middleware. We see online sales going through even though there’s 0 in stock on the Shopify level as well as Lightspeed. This is a huge issue and one that will probably make us move away from Lightspeed and Accumula. Even though I think Accumula is a great middlewear integrator. I think we need to simplify and migrate all operations into Shopify using their own POS.