Multi Location Shipping on Shopify
with the Better Shipping App
How to make multiple product locations work in Shopify.
Whether you have multiple warehouses, or have multiple drop-shipping vendors, using multiple locations on Shopify can be a challenge.
How Shopify calculates multiple locations
When Shopify sends a shipping rate request for a customer cart, with products from multiple locations, they do it in parts. One part for each location, and each part contains only the products for that single location, with no information that it is part of a bigger order.
For example:
A customer purchases a hat for $30 and a shirt for $40 in the same order
the shirt ships from one location
and the hat from another location
tnd you have a free shipping over $50 shipping rule.
In this case, the free shipping rule won't be triggered because each separate shipping request is under $50
Shopify will then take all the returned parts and add them together, which is usually not what you expect, and can be double or triple the actual shipping cost.
There are two different shipping scenarios that cause issues with the shipping calculations:
Drop shipping apps
Drop shipping apps install their own 'app locations' on your store. The app locations are treated as multiple locations by Shopify and will cause issues with shipping calculations.
Those locations, however, are not typically used by the drop shipping apps at all! They can be safely changed to your main store location, eliminating the issue. If you think they might be used, you can email the drop shipping app support and ask them if they use their 'app location' for anything in your store.
Head over to our help documentation to see our guide for changing the drop shipping app locations in bulk.
Multiple warehouses
If you have multiple warehouses, and need to track the inventory at each location, then changing all of your products to one of the locations may not be viable.
The solution to this is to enable Shopify's Single Origin Shipping mode.
This mode allows you to have different inventory locations set for each product, but when Shopify requests a shipping rate from the Better Shipping app, it will treat all products as coming from a single location, and only make a single shipping rate request for all products in the cart, allowing the shipping rules to behave the way you expect.
There are some limitations to single origin mode, however. Head over to our blog post How To Enable Single Origin Shipping to find out more.
More info?
If you are still unsure if this is the right thing for your store, please contact us and let us know your issue. We are happy to work with you to find the best solution for your store.
And don't forget to check out our Better Shipping Help Center for more help documentation and articles.