How To Limit Inventory And Stock To Each Market In Shopify Markets

What is Shopify’s Fulfillable Inventory setting?

If you’re using Shopify Markets to sell internationally and have multiple locations or warehouses that service different regions - it’s always been a bit hard to display only the inventory from the local warehouse.. until now.

Fulfillable inventory allows you to control which inventory is available to customers based on their market and shipping location. It determines whether products are shown as in stock or out of stock on your storefront (product pages and collections pages), and during checkout.

It will let you restrict inventory availability to your locations that can ship to the customer's country, preventing overselling across different locations..

Clearing up some Shopify terms:

A location - is a location in your Shopify admin where you can store inventory. It usually represents a real world warehouse.

A market - is a market that you can set up in Shopify Markets. They are typically set up to target and localise storefront content to a specific country or region.

A shipping zone - is a group of countries or regions grouped together for specific shipping rates in your Shopify shipping settings.

A shipping origin - is a distinct location that we can ship orders from

What the Fulfillable Inventory settings mean

Sell from All Locations to All Shipping Zones

This setting allows customers from any shipping zone to buy products from any of your locations. This means:

• Description: Customers can purchase items stocked in any of your warehouses, regardless of their shipping zone.
• Use Case: Ideal for maximizing sales opportunities, as any location can fulfill orders for any customer if shipping rates are available.

Sell Only Within Configured Shipping Zones

This setting restricts customers to buying products available only in locations that can ship to their specific zone. This means:

• Description: Customers can only buy from locations capable of shipping to their shipping zone, preventing overselling across different zones.
• Use Case: Suitable for ensuring accurate inventory display, such as:
  • Customers in the USA only see inventory from USA locations.
  • Customers in Australia only see inventory from Australian locations.

By focusing on specific configurations, you can better manage your inventory and avoid overselling.

We’ll be focussing on the second setting - ‘Sell only within configured shipping zones’

How to restrict inventory to a specific Shopify Market

We’ll be setting up the following example:

• 2 Locations: USA, Australia
• 2 Shipping Zones and Origins: USA, Australia
• 2 Markets: USA, Australia

Step 1 - Set up your locations

Let’s set up a location (warehouse) for USA, and another for Australia. These will become our Shipping Origins.

1. Navigate to your Shopify Admin
2. Go to Settings in the bottom left
3. Go to Locations
   1. Your default store location will already be set up - this will match your ‘home’ country.
4. Go to ‘Add location’
5. Add your new warehouse location, and set it’s country. In this example we’re creating ‘United States Warehouse’
6. Be sure to check ‘Fulfill online orders from this location’ so your inventory is available on the Online Store.

Now you’ll have two locations. In our case, one is our default warehouse in Australia, the other is our new warehouse in the USA

Step 2 - Set up your Shipping Zones and Shipping Origins

Now we’ll set up our Shipping Origins and Shipping Zones so that:

• Our Australia / default location will ship everywhere, except the United States.
• Our new United States location will only ship to the United States

1. Navigate to your Shopify Admin
2. Go to Settings in the bottom left
3. Go to Shipping and delivery
4. Go to your ‘General’ profile
   1. We’ll set everything up in our default ‘general’ profile for this tutorial
5. By default, you’ll likely have a Shipping Origin and Shipping Zone set up for your home/default country, and maybe a generic ‘International’ zone too.
   1. We’ll keep the home country as is for now, and we’ll create a new Shipping Origin for just the United States
6. ‍
7. If you have the International zone already set up, you’ll need to edit the zone to remove ‘United States’.
   1. Within the International Zone - Click the three dots or ‘more items’ button
   2. Then click ‘edit zone’
   3. Find ‘United States’ and uncheck it.
   4. Removing USA from this Shipping Zone (and consequently, the Shipping Origin too), will mean the Australian Shipping Origin (location) will not be able to ship to the USA as it will not have any shipping rates to present the customer.
8. The goal is to make sure our new Shipping Origin is not in the existing Shipping Origin. We want to separate them.
9. With United States removed from the International Zone in the Australia Shipping Origin, we can now create a new ‘Shipping Origin’
10. Next to ‘Shipping origins’ click the ‘Show details’ to expand more settings
11. Then click the ‘edit’ pencil icon for United States Warehouse
12. In the prompt, click ‘New rates for United States Warehouse’
13. This will create a whole new card below the International and Australia Zones for the new ‘Shipping Origin’
14. It will have no Zones, and no Rates when first created.
15. Let’s add a zone by clicking the ‘Create zone’
16. Name it ‘United States’ and search for the United States option, and check the box.
17. After you click add - Now it will prompt you to add rates, which you can do so to best suit your preferred rates.

Now you’ll see two cards, one for the Shipping Origin in Australia, another for the Shipping Origin in United States. Great!

Step 3 - Create Shopify Markets for Australia and United States

1. Navigate to your Shopify Admin
2. Go to Settings in the bottom left
3. Go to Markets
4. Click the ‘Add Market’ button
5. In the dialogue box that appears, name the market - ‘United States’
6. Then click the search icon (magnifying glass), and search for ‘United States’
7. Check the ‘United States’ and click ‘Add Market’ to create a new Market for the United States
8. Ensure the Market is ‘Active’
   1. You can also adjust other settings here like the Currency USA customers will see and individual product pricing.
9. When finished, click the Back arrow to go back to the Markets screen.

Step 4 - Set the Fulfillable Inventory setting

1. To get Shopify to recognise you are now eligible for Fulfillable Inventory, you’ll need to refresh the page - or close the tab and open a new tab for Shopify admin.
2. Navigate to your Shopify Admin
3. Go to Settings in the bottom left
4. Go to Shipping and delivery
5. You should now see the ‘Fulfillable inventory’ text link inside the Shipping card. Click it.
6. Select the ‘Sell only within configured shipping zones’ option to restrict inventory.
7. Click save

Step 5 - Test it on your storefront!

1. Make sure your theme has the country / market selector activated so the user can switch between markets.
2. Test a product that has inventory in one location, but not another
3. Toggle between the Markets on your storefront to see the result.

Now you’ve got Market specific inventory displaying on your storefront!