One PO, one destination: receiving across Shopify locations

Multi-location inventory on Shopify is mostly a question of where. Where is the stock, where is it going, where did the supplier actually deliver it. Shopify answers the first question well: every tracked variant has a quantity per location, and the admin shows them side by side. Purchasing tools have to answer the second and third, and the way Restock Ops does it is deliberately rigid: a purchase order has exactly one destination location, chosen when it is created, and every receipt against it lands there.

That rigidity is the point of this post. It removes a class of mistakes, it has a couple of consequences worth knowing before you create your first PO for a second store, and it leaves one real-world situation, the delivery that turns up at the wrong place, to be handled a specific way.

Where the destination is chosen

The New purchase order form on the purchase orders page has two choices: supplier and destination location. The list of locations is read live from Shopify's active locations, so a location you archived in Shopify disappears from the picker and a new one appears without any setup in the app.

Which location is preselected is a setting. Under Settings there is a field called Default destination for new POs; leave it on First active location and the picker opens on whichever active location Shopify lists first, or choose a specific one and that is always the default. For a single-warehouse store this is set once and forgotten. For a store that buys mostly for the warehouse and occasionally for a shop, set the warehouse as default and change the picker on the exceptions.

Once a PO exists its destination does not change. The header fields you can edit on a draft, which are the reference, notes, expected date, invoice number, invoice status, due date, invoice total and shipping cost, do not include the location. If a draft was created for the wrong place, delete it and create it again; it takes a few seconds and the lines prefill from the supplier catalog either way. The reason for the restriction is in the next section.

What receiving writes, and where

Every receipt is previewed before it is written, and the preview is phrased in terms of the destination. The list of writes reads, for example:

• Start stocking 3 items at Warehouse: for variants that are tracked but have never been stocked at this location, Shopify requires the inventory item to be activated there first. Restock Ops does this for you and tells you it is about to.
• Increase "available" at Warehouse for 12 items (+340 units, reason "received"): the actual stock adjustment, one per line, with Shopify's received reason so the adjustment history reads correctly.
• Decrease "incoming" by the same units: only if the PO was projected as on order, so that incoming does not stay inflated after the goods arrive.
• Cost updates for lines where the received cost changes the item's unit cost under your chosen cost method.

All of the quantity writes name the PO's destination, and there is no per-receipt location picker on the receive page. That is why the destination is fixed: if it could change after a partial receipt, the first receipt would have gone to one location and the second to another, and the PO would no longer describe where its goods are. One destination per PO keeps the document and the stock in agreement, which matters most at stocktake time, when the app snapshots Shopify's on-hand for one location and asks you to count against it.

Note the exception in that list. Unit cost on Shopify is a property of the inventory item, not of the location, and Restock Ops writes it the same way Shopify does. Receiving the same product at two locations at two different prices updates one cost, under whatever method you set in Settings. If you need location-specific landed costs, that is a reporting question for your accounting system, not something Shopify's data model can hold.

Locations and plans

Restock Ops prices by location count rather than by order volume. Starter works at one location; Pro at up to five. The app reads your active Shopify locations, puts your default first, and the plan limit decides how many of the rest are selectable. Locations beyond the limit are not offered in the picker; if a location you expect is missing there, the plan is the first thing to check.

The same allowance applies to the reorder report and to stocktakes, both of which run per location: on hand and incoming are read from Shopify for the location you pick, while sales velocity is computed shop-wide, because Shopify orders are not reliably attributable to a location once online orders can be fulfilled from anywhere. If you run two stores with very different sell-through, read the velocity column as a store-wide rate and let the per-location on-hand figure do the work of telling them apart.

The delivery that landed in the wrong place

It happens: the PO said Warehouse, the carrier delivered to the shop because that is the address on the account. Two situations, two answers.

If nothing has been received yet and the goods are staying where they landed, cancel the PO and create one for the location that actually has the boxes, then receive it there. Nothing has been written to Shopify by the original PO, so cancelling it is clean, and the supplier catalog memory of prices and SKUs is per supplier, not per PO, so the new one prefills the same.

If part of it has already been received at the destination, or the goods are going to be moved to where they should have gone, receive the PO as written, so the stock lands at the destination the order described, and then move the units with a Shopify inventory transfer between your own locations. Shopify's help centre covers receiving an inventory transfer, and the transfer's incoming quantity shows up on the product at the receiving store while the boxes are in the van. Resist the temptation to receive the PO against the wrong location by hand in Shopify; the PO would then say one thing and the adjustment history another, and the next stocktake at either location would find the discrepancy for you.

Setting it up for a second location

1. In Shopify, add the location and make sure it is active and, if it holds sellable stock, that it is set to fulfil online orders if you want that. Shopify's guide to assigning inventory to locations covers the rest.
2. In Restock Ops, open Settings and set Default destination for new POs to the location most of your orders go to.
3. If you are on Starter, upgrade to Pro so the second location appears in the destination picker.
4. Create one purchase order per destination. A supplier shipment that splits between two stores is two POs to the same supplier, each with its own lines, receipts and CSV export, so the two are easy to total separately.
5. Run the reorder report per location, and stocktakes per location, and let the shop-wide velocity be shop-wide.

None of this is clever. It is a small number of rules that make the purchase order, the receipt and Shopify's per-location quantities tell the same story, which is the only thing a stock count can check against later.

FAQ