Merging locations in Pipe17

How do you merge locations in Pipe17?

Merging a location refers to the action of adding a reference to another location B to the external locations configuration of location A. Upon saving, Pipe17 will automatically update location B to merged status. In the example below, the "Seattle" location from Mock e-commerce V3 is merged to "Seattle - 3pl". 

When should you merge locations?

The main purpose of merging locations is to configure the inventory reporting process. Common use cases are as below:

1. Configuring how inventory updates should be reported to an e-commerce or ERP integration
2. Configuring where pre-routed orders should be sent to in the fulfillment integration
   • In extension to 2., for connectors that support manually pulling pre-routed orders, we can limit orders that we pull to those that are routed to configured locations.

Configuring how inventory updates should be reported

Pipe17 maintains a record of inventory internally, with each record denoted by a SKU and the location it is stored in. Because the inventory records are associated with the fulfillment location, we need to define how the records should be reported to the outbound integration. There are some scenarios to consider:

1. The target integration has one location, or has no concept of storing inventory in multiple locations (e.g., Amazon Seller Central maintains one record for total inventory count). In this case, we can either push inventory totals across multiple locations or push inventory records associated with a single location. In the latter case, we will require location mapping for that location as well as configure the integration settings to only push inventory from that location.
2. The target integration has multiple locations that correspond to inventory stored in each respective location. In this case, we can configure location mapping to merge each e-commerce location to the respective fulfillment location. 

Configuring pre-routed orders

Some integrations have their own internal order routing logic. In this case, we need to configure location mapping so that the specified fulfillment destination in the ingested order is mapped to the same location in Pipe17. In this case, simply merge each location from the source integration to the corresponding location that should handle fulfilling the pre-routed order.