Shopify's logic on "pickup in store can now transfer from multiple locations," when will this be possible to do the same with delivery/shipping?

Fulfillment & Inventory
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We run a retail store with a separate location for our warehouse/online store (conveniently located next door) and have two locations listed on our Shopify portal for inventory purposes. We’ve been dealing for years with Shopify’s split shipping charging multiple rates for pick-up, local-delivery, and shipping or not allowing any options to appear at checkout if an order requires two fulfillment locations. As our two locations are located next door to each other, we transfer the needed inventory or item needed to fulfill any order placed online and do not require multiple shipping rates for an order to be shipped. In our most ideal world, Shopify would allow split shipping to be a on/off toggle for stores with less than 2-3 locations.

Shopify recently introduced in their changelog the function of using transfers from multiple locations to fulfill orders placed for in-store pickup (if a customer selects a store that doesn’t have enough inventory, transfer will be created from multiple locations to complete fulfillment), this is great and finally allows us to use the native Shopify instore pick-up instead of a 3rd party delivery app! I’m here on the forums to ask if anyone knows if this change will soon come to local-delivery & shipping soon? We’ve tried multiple Shopify apps (like ShipperHQ/Intuitive Shipping) to resolve the split-shipping rates but they do not have a solution other than flat-rates (which worked for a time but are now also doubling the shipping rate by the # of fulfillment origins in an order). Any news? Does anyone have a solution in the interim? Combining the two locations into one on Shopify is not an option for us.

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Hey @Vanessa_Zavala,

Quick heads up, this community is focused on developers building with our developer tools, so for merchant-facing questions like this, the Payments, Shipping & Fulfillment board on the Shopify Community is where you’ll get the most relevant help going forward.

That said, I’ve submitted a feature request on your behalf for extending the multi-location transfer logic (the one you’re seeing with pickup-in-store) to local delivery and shipping. Any changes to shipping and fulfillment behavior will show up in the Shopify changelog.

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I think the request would be a good enhancement as part of Fulfillment (Order Routing?), but I don’t think it’s a great solution to solve for shipping rates because it implies that the inventory is actually moving between locations before being shipped. In your use case that is reality, but I hope there’s a more generic approach in the future.

Many merchants want to calculate shipping regardless of which or how many locations being shipped from, but the items will still be fulfilled and shipped from each location, therefore moving inventory would be not represent reality and would break the fulfillment process.

There used to be a “Single Origin Mode” (legacy shipping) that would calculate shipping rates as though all inventory was shipped from the primary location which made it possible to calculate shipping based on the whole cart rather than the fragmented fulfillment, but it is no longer offered. There’s supposed to be an upcoming solution based on conversations at last year’s Editions.dev, but we haven’t heard anything.

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