Warehouses versus Drop Ship locations

Learn how warehouses and drop ship locations differ, and why you should have at least one warehouse defined.

The Small Package Quotes and LTL Freight Quotes products allow the merchant to identify Warehouses and Drop Ship Locations.

Warehouses are stocking locations that are assumed to inventory all products that are not otherwise assigned to a drop-ship location. If a shopping cart contains items that are warehoused and there is more than one warehouse defined, the warehouse closest to the ship-to address is used for retrieving shipping rate estimates.

Drop ship locations are assigned to individual products. A product assigned to a drop-ship location is always quoted as shipping from that location, regardless of the defined warehouses. Refer to the Product Settings section of the User Guide for instructions on how to make the assignment.

A best practice is to define at least one warehouse, even if all your products are drop shipped. This ensures that shipping rate estimates will still be returned if a product was added to your catalog and its drop ship location wasn’t identified.

Examples

In these examples, there are three ship-from locations.  Two are defined in the settings as warehouses, and the third is defined as a drop-ship location.  The warehouses are in Georgia and California (orange map pins).  The drop-ship location is in Texas (blue map pin).

warehouses-vs-dropship-map-v3-500x333

There are three products:

  • Hat
  • Shirt
  • Pants

The Hat's product shipping parameter settings have assigned it to the Texas drop-ship location. The Shirt and Pants aren't assigned to a drop-ship location, and therefore, they are available in all warehouses.

In each example below, all three products are present in the Cart.

Case 1: Ship-to address in Kentucky

The Hat will ship from Texas since it is assigned to that drop-ship location. The Shirt and Pants are in the warehouses. The Georgia warehouse will be the shipment-from location for the Shirt and Pants since it is closer to Kentucky than the California warehouse.

Case 2: Ship-to address in Arizona

The Hat will ship from Texas since it is assigned to that drop-ship location. The Shirt and Pants are in the warehouses. The California warehouse will be the shipment-from location for the Shirt and Pants since it is closer to Arizona than the Georgia warehouse.