Locations

A location is a place where you keep stock. It can also be a place where customers collect their orders. Use this page when you add a warehouse or a shop, or when you want customers to pick up orders.

Litestore doesn't treat warehouses, retail stores and pickup points as different things. They are all locations, and they differ only in what you allow each one to do.

For each location, you set three things:

• whether it ships online orders
• whether it offers pickup
• a priority, which tells Litestore which location to prefer when more than one could handle an order

Litestore stores this in one record:

StockLocation

You manage locations at:

Orders → Locations

That page is next to Stock and Movements.

Shipping and pickup are separate

Shipping online orders and offering customer pickup are two separate settings, and they have different defaults:

• Shipping online orders is on by default.
• Customer pickup is off by default.

A location can do one, both or neither.

The defaults follow the usual case. A new location is normally a place where you keep stock and send parcels from. Opening it to the public is something you decide on purpose.

A location that does neither is still useful. It can hold stock, such as an overflow unit or a store for returns, without appearing at checkout.

Litestore tracks stock separately at each location. You get a count for each location, not one combined number for the business.

What priority does

When more than one location could handle an order, priority decides which one Litestore prefers.

Priority only decides between locations that already qualify. A location that doesn't ship online orders won't be chosen for one, however high its priority.

What customers see for a pickup location

For each pickup location, you enter its address, phone number, opening hours and collection instructions. The checkout picker shows all of these.

These fields aren't internal notes. Customers read them to decide whether collecting is practical for them. An instruction like "ring the bell at the side door" belongs in the collection instructions, not in an email you send later.

When the pickup picker appears

Checkout shows pickup only when all of these are true:

1. The location is active.
2. Pickup is turned on for it.
3. It matches the storefront's country and market.
4. A pickup rate exists.

The fourth condition is the one people miss. Without a pickup rate, the picker never loads, for that location or for any other.

If a pickup location looks correctly set up but doesn't appear, it is usually missing a rate, not a setting.

The picker checks stock

Litestore checks each pickup choice against the cart.

If a location can't supply every line in the cart, the picker shows it as unavailable. The customer can't choose it and only find the problem later.

This is the difference between offering collection and being able to deliver on it. A customer who drives to a shop for an order that was never going to be there has a far worse time than one who was told at checkout.

How a pickup order is collected

A pickup shipment moves through two states:

1. Ready for Pickup. Litestore sends the customer a collection email.
2. Picked Up. Litestore sends nothing when the customer collects the order.

This difference is intentional. The customer needs to know when the order is ready, because that is when they have something to do. They don't need an email to confirm they are holding what they just collected.

Uncollected orders

You set how many days an order can wait for collection. When an order is still uncollected after that, Litestore does two things:

• It sends the customer a reminder.
• It raises a task with a Cancel & restock action.

The action sits on the task because an uncollected order eventually becomes a stock problem. The units are behind your counter, unsold and not counted, and the task is where you decide to put them back into stock.

Because you choose the number of days, you decide when an order counts as abandoned.

Locations in use can't be removed

Two rules stop you from removing a location while it is still in use:

• You can't deactivate a location that holds inventory.
• You can't delete a location that holds inventory or is attached to a shipping rate.

If you deactivated a location that holds stock, those real units in a real building would no longer be counted by the store.

If you deleted a location that a shipping rate points to, that rate would break.

To retire a location, first move its stock out and detach its rates. Litestore enforces this order of steps; it isn't just a suggestion.

Setting up a location

Decide what the location is for before you decide which settings to turn on.

• A warehouse that only sends parcels. Leave the defaults. It ships online orders, and pickup stays off.
• A shop where customers collect orders. Turn on pickup, then fill in the address, phone number, opening hours and collection instructions. Make sure a pickup rate exists, or none of it will appear at checkout.
• A shop that both ships and sells over the counter. Turn on both settings, and use priority to say which location Litestore should prefer when several could fulfill the same order.
• Overflow or returns storage. Leave both settings off and use the location only to hold stock.

Most location decisions come down to one question:

Can a customer's order leave this building, and can a customer walk into it?

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