For certain businesses, the products may not be kept and shipped out from the same physical address as your store. These products are kept at one or many warehouses for logistic reasons. For example, you sell flowers that are held in the East and West coast warehouses to reduce shipping cost and delivery time. Drop-shipping is another common practice where the physical product is shipped directly from the manufacturer's address and not from your store. Your shipping rule can take into account the warehouse location and charge a different amount based on the transit distance. Similarly, your shipping availability rule can determine if only certain shipping methods are available depending on the warehouse origin (e.g. your East coast warehouse can ship by UPS only).

Furthermore, the shipping origin has important tax implications. In almost every U.S state, you are liable for tax collection based on where the product is shipped from (warehouse address, not your business address) and where it is ship to. Your tax rule can charge a different tax rate based on the warehouse origin. Please see Order splitting for more information on how orders are treated by warehouse.

The Storefront handles warehouse information to help optimize your shipping cost and delivery time while ensuring you are compliant with tax laws. It will also track the inventory by warehouse so you know exactly how many products are available in which warehouse at all times. Please see Inventory for more details.

You must first enable the Warehouse feature under Configuration > General.

Public warehouse store

If you operate a physical store (e.g. using the POS feature), you can mark your warehouse as Open to public to indicate this warehouse also acts as a store. You can optionally indicate the opening hours. This information will be shown on the Location module allowing customers to pick their preferred store.

Locations

Customers can locate your public warehouse stores on a map using the Location module. Make sure to enter the Latitude and Longitude values for your warehouse. You can obtain these values by visiting the address on Google Maps. Simply right mouse click on the marker and copy the latitude and longitude set of numbers.