Stock is only in store locations. Now which one ships the order?
Twenty-five stores, a warehouse, and orders arriving from your own site, from marketplaces and from wholesale. The hard question stops being "do we have it" and becomes "which location should send it, and can we promise a date on that". OmniOrders routes each order to the location that should fulfill it — a warehouse, a store or a partner — based on rules the retailer sets.
Four things retailers say when the stores and the website stop agreeing
With one location these are annoyances. Add stores and they compound, because every one of them now has a version of the same answer and no way to agree on it.
"It keeps going out of sync."
The registers hold one number, the website holds another, the marketplace holds a third. Somebody reconciles them in a spreadsheet on Monday, and by Wednesday the spreadsheet is wrong too.
"Stock is only in store locations."
The unit is on a shelf in store seven. The website says shipping is not available, because store seven is not a location online orders can be fulfilled from, so its inventory never reaches the online quantity.
"Which one ships it?"
Two stores and a warehouse can all fill the order. One is closest, one is cheapest to ship from, one is about to sell that unit at full price to a customer standing in front of it. Somebody has to decide, and at volume that somebody cannot be a person.
"We can only do pickup in nine of them."
The storefront counts locations, not stores, and your warehouse takes one of them. Past the plan's limit the rest are not locations at all — not for shipping, and not for showing stock online.
What has to be true before a store can ship an online order
One
Every channel reads the same number
Not a store count and a web count and a marketplace count that get reconciled later. One number per unit, read by every channel, updated when anything moves.
Two
The count can be trusted
A 2020 ECR Retail Loss audit of roughly 233,000 SKUs found the system quantity did not match the shelf for 59.54% of them. Routing to a store needs a minimum on-hand and a recent count behind it.
Three
A rule decides, not a person
Complete fill first, then how much you trust that location's count, then whether the store would have sold the unit anyway, then the carrier cutoff, then cost. Proximity is the tiebreaker at the end.
Four
The store is not punished for it
A store pick costs more than a warehouse pick — typically 1.5 to 2 times more per pick for a majority of retailers, in McKinsey's 2021 figures — and the unit it ships is one the shop floor cannot sell.
Where OmniOrders fits
OmniOrders is an order management system for brands and retailers selling through many channels. It routes each order to the location that should fulfill it — a warehouse, a store or a partner — based on rules the retailer sets, and it can split an order across locations when no single location can fill it.
It supports ship-from-store fulfillment alongside warehouse and partner locations, and it supports EDI for retail and wholesale channels. Buy-online-pick-up-in-store flows can be supported where store inventory is connected — worth asking what that takes with your point-of-sale system.
And the boundary, because the section below is about a limit we do not remove: OmniOrders holds its own locations and routes across all of them. What your storefront will display, and how many locations it will count, stays your storefront's rule. Check it before you design around it.
omniorders.com/integrations lists 137 integrations across sales channels, fulfillment, shipping and ERP or accounting — including Shopify, Amazon and Walmart.
Before you design the rules, check how many locations you are allowed
Storefront platforms count locations, and the count is a plan feature. Shopify's own documentation gives the limits as 2 active locations on Starter, 10 on Basic, Grow and Advanced, and 200 on Shopify Plus; deactivated locations and fulfillment apps do not count toward the limit. Below Plus, a retailer with more than ten places to ship from — the warehouse among them — has to choose which ones the storefront can see.
The second constraint is quieter. A location only takes part in online fulfillment if it is switched on for it, and when it is switched off its inventory is removed from the product's online quantity altogether. That is the mechanism behind stock that exists on a shelf and does not exist on the website.
Platform limits checked against Shopify's published documentation, September 2026. Plans and limits change — verify before you design around them.
Three questions this page does not answer
They are the three that decide whether stores can ship for you, and the answers depend on your systems rather than on ours. Bring them to a demo and make us answer them about your setup, not in general.
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How does store inventory reach the system at all?
Which point-of-sale you run decides this, and it is the first thing to establish — everything above depends on a store count existing somewhere a system can read.
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What happens when the store accepts the order and the unit is not there?
Given how often store records disagree with the shelf, the short-pick path matters as much as the routing rule. Ask to be walked through it.
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Where does a return land when an online order comes back to a store?
A unit handed back at a counter has to become sellable stock somewhere, and which somewhere is a decision worth making before the first peak season.
What changes when every location is in one system
Stores and website kept apart
- Every location keeps its own count, and none of them agree
- An order lands and someone decides by hand which store or warehouse takes it
- An order no single location can fill gets split by hand, or cancelled
- Wholesale orders arrive in a different system from everything else
- Nobody can say which store shipped what without asking the store
With OmniOrders
- Orders from your connected channels land in one system
- Rules you set decide which location fulfills each order
- An order no single location can fill is split across locations
- Stores fulfill alongside the warehouse and partner locations
- Retail and wholesale channels are supported over EDI
Questions retailers ask before stores start shipping
Because that store is not set up as a location your online orders can be fulfilled from. Shopify's documentation puts it plainly: preventing a location from fulfilling online orders "removes any inventory assigned to the location from a product's online quantity". The unit exists, but the storefront cannot see it. Turning the location on fixes the visibility — and then the store's count has to be accurate enough to promise against.
That depends on your storefront plan, and it counts locations rather than stores — your warehouse takes one of them. Shopify allows 2 active locations on Starter and 10 on Basic, Grow and Advanced; Shopify Plus allows 200. Deactivated locations and fulfillment apps do not count toward the limit. Below Plus, a retailer with fourteen stores and a warehouse cannot make every store a fulfillment location.
Only if it can fill the whole order from stock you trust, and only if that unit was not about to sell at full price in the shop. Distance matters because carriers price by zone, but a store pick costs more than a warehouse pick — McKinsey found in-store picking runs typically 1.5 to 2 times higher per pick for a majority of retailers. Treat proximity as the tiebreaker, not the rule.
Accurate enough that a count of one or two means something. A 2020 ECR Retail Loss audit of roughly 233,000 SKUs across about 100 stores found the system quantity did not match the physical quantity for 59.54% of them. That is any mismatch in either direction, not an empty shelf — but it is why routing to a store should have a minimum on-hand threshold and a recency rule behind it.
See it against your own store list
Connect your channels, set the rules for which location fulfills what, and let the rules do the routing. Start with a free trial, or read how the routing decision actually gets made.
Or go straight to order management.