Transfer committed inventory?

Payments + Shipping & Fulfilment
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Topic summary

A retailer is seeking solutions for transferring committed inventory between Shopify locations, which the platform currently doesn’t support.

Core Issue:

  • Online orders commit inventory at specific store locations based on routing rules
  • Items must then be transferred to a warehouse for packing/shipping
  • Shopify only allows transfers from “available to sell” quantities, not committed inventory
  • This creates a mismatch where committed quantities are never properly consumed

Business Impact:

  • Affects multi-location operations: several physical stores plus online fulfillment
  • Also impacts inter-store transfers (e.g., transferring customer’s size from Store B to Store A)
  • Currently blocking migration from legacy POS/inventory system to Shopify POS

Current Status:

  • Exploring third-party Shopify POS apps as potential solution
  • Seeking community input on workarounds or alternative solutions
  • No responses or resolution yet
Summarized with AI on November 1. AI used: claude-sonnet-4-5-20250929.
1

Hi,

Has anyone found a solution or workaround for not being able to transfer committed inventory between locations?

Context:

We have several physical stores and an online store. Almost all online order fulfillments are picked from the physical stores and then transferred to our warehouse to be packed and shipped to the customer. The online order commits the inventory at the location based on the routing rules, but then you cannot select that inventory to transfer to the warehouse, You can only transfer from available to sell qty, and then the committed qty never gets consumed. We also routinely sell a product in store A that we have to transfer in from store B (e.g. customer’s size not available in A, but available in B). Shopify POS/Shopify doesn’t handle this at all well. We are looking into a 3rd party Shopify POS app which is showing promise, but , if there happen to be any workarounds or other solutions out there, it would very helpful to learn about them.

We currently use Shopify for our online store and a legacy POS & IMS for the stores and all movement of inventory. We want to migrate to Shopify POS, but these limitations are blocking us.

Thank you.