Multi-location Inventory for Shopify Suppliers

We are excited to announce support for multi-location inventory in Shopify.

This allows suppliers on Convictional’s platform to wholesale and dropship to the same customer without affecting their inventory with your ongoing sync. That means that your customer can maintain their existing stock, then when that runs out they can start drawing down on your stock for drop shipping. This makes it even more convenient for your customers. In case your customer runs out of their existing stock, they can immediately start selling your inventory without losing the sale.

This fits into the trend towards an endless aisle experience and enables our customers to facilitate the endless aisle concept with your trading partners. In plain english, that means your customers can buy and stock your products and you can fulfill any products they run out of. For you, the original supplier, it means you can provide your online and brick & mortar customers a much easier way to capture sales of your products even when they run out, and to deepen their product selection to include all of your SKUs even if they can’t afford to stock them.

Multi-location inventory itself is a self-explanatory concept. It means that a company's inventory is held in more than one location. There are many advantages to having multiple inventory locations, but the most common reasons are having an increased level of total available stock to service demand, economies of scale (decreasing marginal cost on production or procurement), and delivery speed for customers. Having multiple inventory locations is also a more realistic option for suppliers as they may service multiple countries.

Shopify’s multi-location inventory capabilities were announced at their annual developer conference, Unite 2018. In the two weeks following the launch of this feature, we’ve already added support for it to Convictional’s platform.

For more information on Shopify's Inventory API, you can refer to their guide on it here.