I have a product that comes in different colors, and my warehouses run out of these colors at different times. I want to be able to tell customers in certain countries that certain colors are unavailable to ship to them, because they are out of stock at the warehouse that serves them.
I have four locations and have created shipping zones for these locations. Inventory tracking for the color variants seems to be working fine - it correctly says there are 0 available at one location, while there are 14 available at another. What am I missing? I can still buy all the colors regardless of my shipping address.
Unfortunately, this is a limitation with Shopify, and I’m not aware of any workarounds at this time. Inventory is based on priority and isn’t limited by location. Essentially what happens is that Shopify goes down the list of locations. If there is zero inventory at one location, it looks at the next one until it finds inventory. Their system doesn’t cross-check to see if the Location is in the same zone as the customer. They are completely independent. That’s why you’re still able to check out from anywhere, as long as there is inventory in at least one location. I would suggest raising this issue to Shopify so they’re aware of it.
Please can you tell me if there has been any workaround from Shopify on this since this was posted? It is a significant limitation for international businesses such as ourselves and we’ve been waiting several years for it to be sorted. Thanks.
It seems there has been an update on this since Ron answered. What you need is “Fulfillable Inventory” and set to “Sell only within configured shipping zones”. Docs here: