Hi everyone!
I’m developing a dropshipping app that offers products from different suppliers. The issue is that they all have different availability, so I need to limit the visibility of each product for certain countries.
Each shop has it’s own markets configuration where they can have various combination, for example: “Europe” with 10-20 countries where they ship their products. I cannot simply publish there, because my products then will be immediately available on all those countries too. Using an API to create/modify markets is not an option too: it might have big implications for the shop owners and also will not work for non-shopify-plus owners as those can have max. 3 markets.
Are there any solutions?
Thanks!
1 Like
Hey @Drafter500
This is an interesting scenario. The simplest option may be to give that markets control to the merchants using your app. Ensure they are aware of country specific limitations when importing products so they can more easily add them to their shop. You could even query their current markets and shipping settings and then filter the products available to be added to their store based on that.
Generally though, I would suggest reading through our Apps in orders and fulfillment guides as that will give you a good base for the different options available through fulfillment and inventory management apps.
You mentioned markets may not work, however our guide on Shopify Markets may include some tools that you can utilize in your app to make this easier for merchants that use your app.
It can also be really helpful to review our merchant documentation on setting up Shipping and fulfillment to help you get a sense of what we are recommending to merchants when it comes to shipping. https://help.shopify.com/en/manual/fulfillment/setup
Hopefully that helps unblock you a bit while you decide on the best way to do this.
Hey, just checking in to see if the above information helped.
Hi, thank you for your answer, I went through the links, but unfortunately couldn’t find an optimal solution yet.
Your first suggestion sounds like the most robust and straightforward but is not flexible, Im afraid very big amount of our products will be filtered out, for example if supplier only ship within Germany and if the shop market includes at least one more country like Austria, then none of that supplier’s products will be eligible. Bigger shops that sell to 20 countries would have even smaller range of products, if any at all.
Hey,
That’s a good point. Using the shipping settings to restrict shipping may be another option to give more flexibility, but you would need to consider the merchant may have different shipping strategies for other products as well.
Another option is to use theme extensions to hide products from specific locales to reduce the likelihood that they would be purchase.
Ultimately, I think merchant education on which product can ship where and some guidance on the best way to configure their markets/shipping to work with your products may be best. Then pair that with some alerts to let them know when they may be selling a product to a market it can’t be shipped to.