Shopify Multiple Warehouses: Multi-Location Inventory

How Shopify Handles Multiple Warehouses and Locations

Let’s imagine you sell hoodies. Everyone loves them because they make you feel warm and cozy while also adding a dash of intrigue for everyone else, “Who is that? Why are they concealing their face? I need to know!”

And because of the reasons listed above, your hoodies are in demand, so you have a large warehouse outside of the city limits that acts as a distribution hub, and a store in the city for the inner-city youths to buy up. If you are using Shopify to manage your inventory, it won’t show you the inventory count for all of your hoodies at both locations. Instead, it will show you how much inventory you have on-hand at the store and how much you have at the warehouse.

And in a nutshell, that essentially covers Shopify's multiple warehouse approach to inventory management, a way to track everything at multiple locations by location, including:

Inventory counts
Order fulfillment
Staff access

So, let’s delve deeper into the world of Shopify multi-location inventory and what its benefits are.

Why Tracking Inventory Per Location With Shopify Is Important

Since Shopify can help you manage inventory levels at different locations, it allows you to dictate how much inventory should be carried at each location, and even define the purpose this inventory will be serving.

What we mean by purpose is whether the inventory will be on-hand for order fulfillment. Or will you be keeping inventory at this place to sell directly to customers? Or will it be a combination of both?

So, back to your hooded products as an example. You may want to keep a large part of your hoodies, let’s say 200, at your warehouse as this is the location in which you fulfill your online orders. You keep a smaller count of 15 on a shelf with a retailer, since sales there depend on foot traffic, and product there tends to be slow moving. But, let’s imagine a local internet celebrity is coming into the store today to do some IRL streaming, you may want to transfer stock from the warehouse to the store in anticipation of there being a large number of people who’ll be walking by your shelf. All of that is a good example of what you can do with Shopify if you’re using it to manage multiple warehouses.

And it doesn't stop there. You can also manage inventory that you have stored at a location that is managed by a 3PL.

How inventory management at your multiple warehouses works in this instance is that Shopify treats any third-party tools you use to manage this inventory as its own location or storefront.

So, if you’re a dropshipper (which many Shopify merchants are), you can manage your own inventory and the inventory held at someone else's location all within one place, and can access all these places via:

The Inventory page in your admin
The bulk editor
An exported CSV
The product’s own page

How Orders Get Routed to the Right Place

Congratulations! Someone purchased a hoodie online.

Next step is to make sure that they now get their order. How this happens in Shopify is that when an order is created, Shopify determines where the best place is to ship it from. By default, Shopify decides this based on which is the closest order fulfillment point with stock available. If the nearest location doesn’t have any inventory on hand, then it falls back to the next location based on the location priority order you set up.

If the default location Shopify has chosen isn’t ideal for you, you can open up the e-commerce platform and either switch a location on or off as a fulfillment point for online orders.

This means if you have two warehouses and a retail store, you can set it up in a way so that the retail store never fulfills online orders and that stock is used strictly for brick-and-mortar sales. Another thing you can do with Shopify multiple warehouse management is set up click-and-collect too. So, instead of shipping out your orders, customers can come to a local pickup point and collect their hoodie themselves.

Setting Up Multiple Locations in Shopify

Now that you know how Shopify multiple warehouses work, it's time to get down to the nitty gritty of getting them properly up and running in your operations.

Setting up warehouses and other locations in Shopify happens in two phases:

Creating the locations themselves
Assigning products and inventory to each one

Thankfully, it’s not a complicated process and doesn’t require any third-parties to come in and develop anything for you. All this can be done from the Shopify admin:

Adding a New Location

To add a location:

From your Shopify admin, go to Settings > Locations and click Add location.
Enter a location name and its physical address.
Decide whether this location should fulfill online orders. The "Inventory at this location is available to fulfill online orders" option is turned on by default, so leave it active for a location that should ship orders, or turn it off for one that only handles in-store sales.
If it's a physical storefront you want customers to be able to find, turn on the option to list it through the Shop sales channel.
Click Save.

We're not sure kids still say this, but at one point at this stage, someone would have said “Boom!”

Your location is now added and saved to your account, and in the priority order sits at the bottom of the list. If you need this place to be your ultimate default sales location, then you will need to adjust its positioning against the other locations you’ve saved.

But if you’re someone who has more than two locations, beware before you start going crazy adding location after location, as there are limits.

Location Limits by Plan

The number of locations that you can actively manage within Shopify depends on your subscription tier:

Starter: 2 locations
Basic: 10 locations
Grow: 10 locations
Advanced: 10 locations
Shopify Plus: 200 locations

However, deactivated locations aren’t counted toward the limit, and included in the exemption list are your location apps (the dropshipping, 3PL, and custom fulfillment services we touched upon earlier). The reason these aren’t counted as locations is because they’re saved separately from locations, under the App and customer fulfillment locations section. Current usage against the limit is visible on the same settings page.

Assigning Inventory to Locations

Now that you've created your locations and integrated your 3PL apps, it's time to get your products saved to these locations.

Some of this happens automatically. For example, when you add a new product to Shopify, the platform will assign it to all your existing locations and set the inventory level as zero at every location. For that product to become sellable at a location, it needs to be activated by adding a minimum inventory level to that location. Inventory quantities can still be tracked and adjusted at a location regardless of whether that location is active for fulfillment, since activating or deactivating a product at a given location doesn't affect its recorded quantity there.

What this allows you to do is give you a few different ways to split stock across your different inventory locations:

Keep popular products stocked at every location for faster fulfillment
Restrict specialty items to a single location
Weight inventory toward regions with higher demand
Reserve stock at a location for in-store sales only, by leaving it inactive for online fulfillment

One limit worth knowing: a product can't be fully unstocked from a location that has unfulfilled orders or an active inventory transfer tied to it.

To stock a single product at a location:

Open the product page.
Go to the Inventory section and click Edit locations.
Check the locations that should stock it.
Enter a quantity for each one.
Click Done, then Save.

For updates across many products at once, the bulk editor handles up to 50 products per batch, while a CSV import is the better route for catalogs of 100 or more. Stock can also reach a new location through an inventory transfer from an existing one, rather than a manual quantity entry.

One distinction worth tracking separately: locations that don't fulfill online orders (retail-only stores, for instance) still have their stock counted in total inventory, but not in the online quantity shown to customers, which is what determines whether a product displays as available in the online store.

An Example of Distributing Inventory Across Locations

A store with a Los Angeles warehouse and a Toronto retail location might stock 100 units of a product in Los Angeles and 50 in Toronto.

Order routing then determines fulfillment automatically (US orders draw from the Los Angeles stock, Canadian orders from Toronto) while quantities at each location remain visible and adjustable independently in the admin.

Managing Multiple Warehouses and Fulfillment Apps Together

A warehouse in Shopify is simply a location you own or operate directly, distinct from a fulfillment app, which is a third-party service (a 3PL, dropshipper, or print-on-demand provider) that gets installed and then appears as its own location, receiving fulfillment orders through the Fulfillment Orders API rather than through manual assignment.

As of February 2026, Shopify is migrating all fulfillment services to support multi-location inventory management, a rollout expected to finish by mid-March 2026. Stores on an older fulfillment service have their inventory settings updated automatically, and stores that only use fulfillment services without managing their own locations see no change to their existing workflow.

Multi-Origin Shipping Rates

When orders ship from more than one location, shipping rates need to reflect where each item is actually coming from rather than a single default origin.

Activating multi-origin shipping within your shipping profiles ensures rates are calculated based on the specific location fulfilling each order, which matters once inventory is split across a warehouse, a retail store, and one or more fulfillment apps with different shipping zones.

Safety Stock and Buffers Per Location

Two approaches are commonly used to set a safety buffer for each location.

The days-of-cover method calculates safety stock as average daily sales multiplied by a chosen number of safety days, with that day count (typically somewhere in the 5-to-10-day range) set according to how variable demand is and how long the location's lead time runs. The variability-adjusted method instead calculates safety stock as P95 daily sales multiplied by lead time days, minus average daily sales multiplied by that same lead time, building the buffer around demand variability rather than a flat day count.

In practice, safety day values are often stored in a product metafield keyed by location, so that fulfillment logic in a WMS or in Shopify Flow can reference them directly and block allocation into that buffer for non-expedited orders. These buffers are worth revisiting monthly at the SKU and location level, increasing the buffer wherever demand variance or lead times run long.

Transfers and Replenishment Cadence

Moving stock between locations is handled through Shopify's transfer feature, typically run on a weekly or biweekly schedule tied to how quickly each location is selling through its inventory.

Replenishment can be governed by two calculations:

A reorder point per location equal to lead time days plus safety days multiplied by average daily sales
A reorder quantity equal to the max stock level minus current available stock

A separate staging location for inbound stock that hasn't yet been received helps keep available-to-sell quantities realistic, rather than counting stock that's technically inbound but not yet ready to fulfill from.

Backorders and Preorders Across Locations

When backorders are enabled (continuing to sell after a product is out of stock), expectations should be set per location, tagging items with an estimated arrival date tied to their origin and showing delivery windows that match the market being sold into.

Preorders work best when handled through a separate, dedicated preorder location, which isolates that inventory from active distribution centers and prevents oversell against stock that's actually available to ship now.

Bundles, Kitting, and Component Availability

A bundle is defined as a SKU that consumes its component items' inventory at whichever location is fulfilling the order, which means a bundle is only available for sale if every component it requires exists at that same location in sufficient quantity. A bundle can't draw one component from one warehouse and another component from a different one.

Where a 3PL is involved, it's worth clarifying upfront whether kitting happens pre-kitted or on-demand, and making sure component availability is synced back to Shopify (or that bundle-level availability is calculated through an app or OMS) so the storefront doesn't show a bundle as available when its components aren't actually co-located.

Managing Multi-Warehouse Shopify Inventory with Digit

Digit connects to Shopify through a one-way sync, pulling in products, customers, and orders so a business can run inventory, production, and fulfillment from one system rather than switching between Shopify and a separate ERP.

New orders and inventory updates sync every 10 to 15 minutes, and Digit becomes the source of truth for stock and order status. Setup typically takes under an hour: connect the account, grant permission, and run the import.

Where Digit extends beyond Shopify's native multi-location tools is on the manufacturing side. It supports multi-level bills of materials with version control, linking BOMs to routings so costs roll up automatically into real-time job and SKU margins. Batch and serial tracking add audit-trail traceability on top of Shopify's native inventory system, useful for recalls or compliance needs, while barcode scanning and bin-level tracking extend visibility within each warehouse. Digit also adds forecasting-driven reorder points on top of Shopify's basic stock tracking, plus automatic packing slips, bills of lading, and a live B2B customer portal.

This fits businesses manufacturing what they sell, or running multiple warehouses that want production, purchasing, and fulfillment unified in one platform.

If you have any questions or would like to explore the Shopify multiple warehouse integration in more detail, then feel free to book a call with one of our experts who’ll be more than happy to take you on a tour.