Inventory locations are a key ingredient to successful inventory management in Pipe17. Keeping your locations clear and organized will avoid confusion when reviewing your inventory.
In this article
Overview
A location is somewhere where inventory is stocked: for example you could have a US East, US West, and Canada location for your warehouses in each of those places.
To edit these locations, you can navigate to Inventory > Locations in your Pipe17 portal to make changes.
Edit locations
Click on the name of the location to open the edit page.
- Change the location status: You can mark a location inactive if it is no longer in use.
- Change the name of the location: Enter a name that is descriptive and meaningful to you when you review your Inventory page.
- Change the 3PL integration: You can use the 3PL integration field to indicate which 3PL this location belongs to. This should be configured by default after adding the integration, so you should not have to edit this manually.
- Set bundle behavior: If you enabled "Preserve bundles" for this location, any shipping requests sent to this location will not decompose a bundle SKU into its component SKUs. Instead, it will persist the bundle SKU in the shipping request. Also any receipts against a transfer will be expected to be for the bundle SKU. This would also disable bundle inventory calculation for this location since the assumption is this location work directly with the bundle and not the bundle components.
- Change the address of the location.
- Add external locations: your external locations are the location IDs in each system that contains a location that "corresponds" to the current location. For example, you could have your location US West at your Deliverr 3PL, and the same location also exists in your Shopify selling channel as "US West Warehouse" and in your Walmart selling channel as "Deliverr". All are the same location, but with different names and IDs in each system. Read more about linking locations in our guide on location merging.
Add locations
You can create locations using the "Create Location" button in the Locations page.
Why would I manually create a location?
Generally, 3PL locations are added automatically when you configure a 3PL connector, so there will rarely be a need for you to add one manually. However, you may want to manually create a virtual location in Pipe17. For example, you might choose to configure an order routing rule to send orders that you don't want to ship to a "fake" location in Pipe17.
Delete locations
To delete a location, click the "Delete" button below the External location section in the location page.
Generally, we recommend simply deactivating locations as described in Edit locations. Only delete a location if you are absolutely certain you no longer need it, or its history.
Location Priority
By default Pipe17 will prioritize fulfilling an order from a single location. This means, by default we will not try to split orders and will try to fulfill an order at a single location. It is possible to split orders between multiple locations, which is where Location Priority comes in.
Location priority is determined through the order routing tool. If splitting orders is not indicated within the Order Router, we will fulfill at the first available location that has all inventory associated with the order. Our system will look at the locations in the same order they appear within the Order Router menu, and fulfill the first available.
Example, Warehouse 1 has 5 units of SKU A. Warehouse 2 has 5 units of SKU B. Warehouse 3 has 5 units of SKU A and 5 units of SKU B.
Split Orders Allowed: If split orders are allowed, we would be able to fulfill from Warehouse 1 for SKU A, however, since SKU B is not available - we would then checking Warehouse 2, which has SKU B. Our system will then automatically detect this, and fulfill the individual SKU's from each warehouse - rather then send the entirety of the order to either location.
Split Orders Disabled: If split orders are not allowed from the same example, we would not be able to fulfill from Warehouse 1, or Warehouse 2 as they do not contain the SKU's required for this order. This means, as our system goes through the list it would result in Warehouse 3 being used - as it has both SKU's.
Location Priority Enabled: With location priority enabled, our example would look similar to split orders being disabled. In this case, our system will try to find the location that can fulfill all SKU's (if possible) - from the same ex
You can re-arrange the order of the warehouses if you would prefer some warehouses be used over others, and our system will automatically detect this during the routing process.
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