Locations

Locations are where your stock lives and, optionally, where customers collect their orders.

A warehouse, a retail store, and a pickup point are not separate concepts here. They are all locations, and what makes them different is what each one declares it can do.

Every location declares three things:

• Whether it ships online orders
• Whether it offers pickup
• A priority, which decides which eligible location is preferred when more than one qualifies

One record carries this:

StockLocation

The work lives at:

Orders → Locations

That sits alongside Stock and Movements.

Two independent roles

Shipping online orders from a location and offering customer pickup there are 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 reflect the common case: a new location is usually somewhere you hold stock and send parcels from, and opening it to the public is a decision you make on purpose.

A location doing neither is still useful. It holds stock — an overflow unit or a returns store — without appearing at checkout.

Stock is tracked separately at each location, so the counts are per location rather than one pooled number for the business.

What priority does

When more than one location qualifies for an order, priority decides which one is preferred.

It only breaks ties between locations that were already eligible. A location that does not ship online orders is not going to be chosen because it has a high priority.

What a pickup location publishes

A pickup location carries:

• Its address
• Its phone number
• Its opening hours
• Its collection instructions

The checkout picker shows them.

Those fields are not internal notes. They are what a customer reads while deciding whether collecting is practical, so "ring the bell at the side door" belongs in the collection instructions rather than in an email you send afterwards.

When the picker appears

Pickup shows at checkout only when every one of these is true:

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

The fourth is the one that catches people out. Without a pickup rate the picker never loads — not for that location, and not at all.

So a pickup location that seems to have been configured correctly and still does not appear is usually missing its rate, not its settings.

The picker checks stock

A pickup choice is checked against the cart.

A location that cannot cover every line in the cart shows as unavailable, rather than letting the customer pick it and discover the problem later.

This is the difference between a store that offers collection and a store that can honour it. A customer who has driven to a shop to collect an order that was never going to be there has had a worse experience than one who was told at checkout.

The pickup lifecycle

A pickup shipment moves through two states:

1. Ready for Pickup. This sends the customer a collection email.
2. Picked Up. Nothing is sent when the order is finally collected.

The asymmetry is intentional. The customer needs telling when the order is ready, because that is when they have something to do. They do not need an email confirming that they are holding the thing they are holding.

Uncollected orders

An order left uncollected past the number of days you set does two things:

• Sends the customer a reminder
• Raises a task, carrying a Cancel & restock action

The action is on the task because an uncollected order eventually stops being a pickup problem and becomes a stock problem. The units are sitting behind your counter, unsold and uncounted, and the task is where you decide to put them back.

You set the number of days, so the point at which an order is treated as abandoned is yours to choose.

Locations that still matter cannot vanish

Two rules stop a location being removed while it is still doing something.

• A location holding inventory cannot be deactivated.
• A location holding inventory or attached to a shipping rate cannot be deleted.

Deactivating a location holding stock would strand the stock: real units, in a real building, that the store no longer counts.

Deleting one attached to a shipping rate would break the rate that points at it.

So to retire a location you move its stock out and detach its rates first. The order of operations is enforced rather than suggested.

Setting up a location

Decide what the location is for before you decide what to switch on.

For a warehouse that only sends parcels, leave the defaults alone: it ships online orders, and pickup stays off.

For a shop where customers collect, enable pickup, fill in the address, phone, opening hours, and collection instructions, and make sure a pickup rate exists — otherwise nothing you configured will appear.

For a store that both ships and sells over the counter, enable both roles and let priority decide which location is preferred when several could fulfill the same order.

For overflow or returns storage, leave both roles off and use it purely to hold stock.

The question that settles most location decisions:

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

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