What Shopify Locations Does

Shopify's Locations feature allows you to specify multiple shipping origins for your Products. If you have Products that ship from specific warehouses or retailers, you can use Locations to get more accurate shipping rates, and to ensure Products ship from the intended origin.

Details

Products may only be assigned to one Location. This means that if you set Whiplash to fulfill a Product, you may not assign another fulfillment service. Each fulfillment service will automatically show up as an available Location, but you may not elect to have an item fulfilled by more than one of them.

There is only a single Location per fulfillment service. This means that Locations will not connect to your various Whiplash warehouses. From the Whiplash perspective, there is no advantage to using Locations. With appropriate caution, the disadvantages may also be mitigated.

Multiple Fulfillment services

You can use Whiplash along with another WMS, with a few caveats:

• Whiplash can sync inventory to one Location.
• Rules will need to be configured to make sure Whiplash doesn't ship orders meant for another WMS, or vice versa (e.g. cancel all orders to Switzerland if a different warehouse ships within Switzerland).

If you have Locations enabled, you have to choose either Whiplash or Shopify/Manual. Select Shopify/Manual if you would like multiple fulfillment services to fulfill any Product(s), or wish to fulfill some Products manually that Whiplash fulfills. You or any fulfillment service may fulfill Orders with Products set to Shopify/Manual.

If you use distinct fulfillment services to fulfill specific Products, you will likely want to assign each Product to its appropriate fulfillment service.

Multiple Whiplash facilities

Shopify only gives us one Location—stock in all our facilities adds up to the total. In most cases, this is what you want. Read more about using multiple warehouses here.

Locations Setup

The goal: the "Fulfill items for this fulfillment service" matches the "Inventory managed by" setting in Shopify.

Shopify

Go to Settings → Locations:

Shopify will create a Location for you using the store address you've entered. Then, when you install Whiplash, an additional Location is created.

For each Product/Variant, you must select either Whiplash or Shopify (the default, or Primary, Location for your account). To do this, you will need to go to the Item details page in Shopify.

Whiplash

In Whiplash, you will need to let us know whether we should be fulfilling items set to Whiplash or items set to Shopify. While we can process orders for either or both, we can only mark orders set to one or the other as Fulfilled. Go to Manage → Shops → Settings.