Locations

A location is a place where you keep stock, and 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 need to let customers pick up orders.

Location fields

Litestore treats warehouses, retail stores and pickup points the same way. They're all locations, and the only difference between them is what you allow each one to handle: shipping online orders, customer pickup, or both.

Litestore stores this in one record:

StockLocation

You manage locations at:

Orders → Locations

That page is next to Stock and Movements.

Shipping and pickup

A location can ship, offer pickup, do both, or do neither.

The defaults reflect the most common setup. A new location is usually a place where you keep stock and send parcels from, and you need to turn on pickup explicitly for customers to be able to collect orders there.

A location that does neither can still be useful. It can hold stock, for example as overflow storage or a place for returns, without appearing at checkout.

Litestore tracks stock separately at each location, so each location has its own count rather than sharing a single combined number for the business.

Priority

When more than one location could handle an order, Litestore uses priority to determine which one to prefer.

Priority only applies to locations that already qualify. For example, Litestore won't choose a location that doesn't ship online orders for an online order, no matter how high its priority is.

Pickup details

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

Customers use these details to judge whether collecting the order is practical for them, so write them for customers rather than as internal notes. For example, an instruction like "ring the bell at the side door" should go in the collection instructions instead of in an email you send later.

Pickup picker

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 that's most often missed. Without a pickup rate, the picker never loads, for that location or for any other.

Pickup stock check

Because the picker checks stock, customers are only offered pickup at locations that can actually supply their order. Finding out at checkout that a location doesn't have the items is much better for a customer than travelling to a shop for an order that isn't there.

Pickup collection

A pickup shipment moves through two states.

The customer needs an email when the order is ready, because that's when they need to come and collect it. Once they've collected it, there's no need to send a confirmation.

Uncollected orders

An order can wait for collection for seven days. If it's still uncollected after that, Litestore sends the customer a reminder and alerts the store's notification email. The seven days are part of the store's configuration rather than an admin setting.

An uncollected order ties up stock: the units are sitting behind the shop counter, unsold and not counted as available. If the customer won't collect it, cancel the order from its page, which refunds it and puts the units back into stock.

Location removal

You can't deactivate a location that holds inventory, and you can't delete a location that holds inventory or is linked to a shipping rate.

If you deactivated a location that holds stock, the store would stop counting units that physically exist. If you deleted a location that a shipping rate refers to, that rate would stop working.

Location setup

Work out what the location will be used for before you choose which settings to turn on.

When you set up a location, the main choices are whether orders can ship from it and whether customers can collect orders there.

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