Planned Add support for Shopify's multiple locations feature
Stan Ward - Inventory Technology Partners
Hello DEAR,
Shopify announced their multiple location feature last summer (2018). I am now seeing businesses need to this feature to be supported by DEAR. Please add support for multi-location to the Shopify integration feature set. I believe other inventory management systems have added this feature, so it is important for DEAR to add it in order to stay on parity with these other inventory management solutions.
Here is some background on it, including a specific one for app developers:
- Shopify Locations: What This Update Means for App Developers
- Shopify’s Newest Feature Helps Retailers Track Inventory Across Multiple Locations
- Converting to multiple locations: Setup guide
Thanks,
Stan
Isn't this it?
@Tim Richardson - Yes, I just noticed that, too. Looks promising. I am going to look into this. Thanks!
The issue here is that the 'support' is extremely limited. With the exception of this one setting, there is nowhere else in the system where you can actually leverage the Shopify Location information to your advantage. Just a handful of thoughts on where you might need that info, but not be able to find it:
1. If you are selling using Shopify POS and also online, it would be critical to know which orders came in through the website vs the POS....but DEAR doesn't differentiate online orders from POS orders, which means every POS order just shows up in the list of orders waiting to be fulfilled even though more than likely you let your customers walk out of the store with their purchased items when they buy at the POS. If DEAR would show you which Shopify Location the orders came through, you could manually 'fulfill' those orders in DEAR, but they won't allow you to see that info. Which means your POS orders are just sitting there in DEAR and inventory is not being adjusted accordingly. Additionally, your pick/pack team may try to fill those orders - wasting tons of time. Yes, you can see the DEAR location, but that doesn't help if you have more than one Shopify Location shipping from the same warehouse location.
2. For the purpose of accounting reports, forget it. No easy way to identify which sales channel your orders came through. If you are using Shopify's Ebay integration, for example, those orders will just show up in DEAR with no way to differentiate them from your website orders. If you're like us, we handle accounting for our Ebay orders a fair bit differently than straight online retail sales.
3. If you're trying to use DEAR's workflow automations it lets you choose from a wide variety of order conditions when establishing which orders will be put through the workflows you are creating - but for some reason they do not have SHOPIFY LOCATION as one of the order conditions you can work with. This would be tremendously helpful in several ways, including the ability to automate fulfillment of POS orders so that they aren't sitting there without properly impacting your available inventory.
Those are just a few thoughts. DEAR is a good tool set, but they are really overstating things when they say they are Shopify integrated. It's in desperate need of a few small tweaks before it can be considered production ready.
Hi All,
This feature for Shopify multiple locations is already implemented as stated above, while for your concern about the ability to differentiate Shopify Onine and POS sales on our sales listing a simple workaround would be to use the "Shipping address". For Shopify online sales there is always a shipping address while for POS sales there is will be no shipping address. The shipping address can be also used on the Sales listing to filter out the sales.
Hope this helps!
Regards,
Leoni
Hi
It would be great if Dear could accept the Shopify location into the 'Pick' location, that way the inventory levels could be synced for ALL sales from Shopify. It's quite common for an online sale to be partially shipped from a main warehouse and a physical store, especially with Shopify's 'fulfilment priority' rules.
For this to work the General Setting 'The available quantity is limited to : ALL LOCATIONS' would need to be selected.
The Shopify integration setting 'Pick, Pack and Ship process mode for online sales : Auto Pick (or a new setting of 'Picking' which performs a 'hard pick' without authorising').
Then Dear could accept a sale from Shopify that has location information for each product and allocate the stock from the correction wareshouse in order to update all channels with the correct available stock.
Additional to this, it would be helpful to have the ability to 'restock' to ANY location which would then facilitate a seamless refund/restock process in Shopify - as a lot of large Shopify retailers have a dedicated 'returns' warehouse location for processing returns. Therefore the restock location would normally be different to the original Pick Location which is currently not supported by Dear. See https://support.dearsystems.com/support/discussions/topics/11000025463
See screenshots of how the mapping should result...
It looks like the latest release has made some improvements in handling Multi-location Sales Orders from Shopify. However, I'm still seeing some shortcomings with the set-up that need to be addressed.
Because the order is created at the header level, the inventory location for an order containing items in multiple locations will come in as the same location for all items. If you are importing orders as soon as they are created in Shopify, but before they are fulfilled, there could potentially be hours or days before the fulfillments get sorted out. This causes inventory sync discrepancies online. It also categorizes the order as "Backordered". Even after the subsequent fulfillments come into the order from Shopify - thereby creating Pick/Pack/Ship from the appropriate location, there is still a "Backordered" status on the order.
Any idea when these issues will get sorted out?