Which location fulfils an order

If you keep stock in one place, this page has nothing for you: every order comes off that place. It matters the moment you have two.

An order is fulfilled from one location, and its stock is committed there when the order is placed, not when you pack it. That is what stops two customers buying the last unit. Which location that is comes from the first of these that applies.

1. The branch the customer was shopping

If you have branch ordering switched on, the customer picks a branch in your shop's header and everything they see is that branch's stock and prices. A basket is locked to one branch, so the order is fulfilled from it. Nothing below overrides this.

Switching branch with items in the basket clears it, which the shop warns about first: the basket belongs to one branch, and carrying it across would promise stock that branch may not have.

2. A pickup point's linked location

If the customer chose collection, the order is assigned to the stock location that pickup point is linked to. That is the one field on the pickup form that does work behind the scenes, and it is why Pickup locations asks you to set it.

A pickup point with no linked location falls through to the rules below, which means the stock can come off a different shop from the one the customer is about to walk into. That is the single most common way to end up with an order the counter cannot hand over.

3. Your fulfilment strategy

Everything else is decided by Settings → Fulfillment.

• Primary Location Only always commits to your primary location, whatever anyone else is holding. Simple, and deliberately not clever: if the primary is out, the order is a backorder there.
• Best Available Location picks one location that can cover the whole line, using the tiebreaker below. If no single location can, it fills from several in tiebreaker order.
• Split Across Locations fills from the best locations in order until the quantity is met.

The tiebreaker

It appears only under Best Available Location.

• Primary Location First: the primary wins if it has any stock at all, even one unit of ten. This is worth reading twice, because it is a policy and not an oversight: it means "ship from my main warehouse", and it accepts a backorder there rather than splitting a parcel.
• Most Stocked Location: whichever has the most units available, with no preference for the primary.
• Nearest to Customer: the location closest to the delivery address, matched on local government area first, then state. Where the address has no state to match on, it falls back to preferring the primary.

Your primary location is the one marked Primary under Settings → Locations.

What "available" means here

Available is what is on hand, minus what is already committed to orders you have not fulfilled, minus anything marked unavailable. A location with stock on the shelf but all of it spoken for is not a candidate, because committing against it is how the same unit gets sold twice.

If nothing anywhere can cover a line, the whole quantity is committed to your primary location rather than quietly shipping short. That is the deliberate backorder, and it shows there rather than nowhere.

The reservation timeout

Also on this page: how long stock is held for an order that has not been paid. It exists for a customer who was sent to a card page and never came back, and it never touches an order paid by bank transfer or on delivery, because those are unpaid at that point by design. Set it to zero to switch it off.

If it does not work

• Stock came off the wrong shop: check the pickup point is linked to a stock location, then check your strategy and tiebreaker.
• The primary keeps being chosen even when it is nearly empty: that is Primary Location First doing what it says. Choose Most Stocked Location if you want the stock to decide.
• An order is split across two locations: either your strategy is Split, or Best Available found no single location that could cover it.
• A branch sees other branches' orders: it should not. Orders are listed against the location fulfilling them.
• You want the customer to choose the branch: that is branch ordering, on the same settings page.

Email support@shoponent.com with your store name and an order number if anything here does not match what you see. We read and answer every message.