Proximity Routing: Warehouses

Solid Commerce offers advanced routing options for order fulfillment if you have more than one warehouse within your Channels Manager account.   

If you have inventory in your "Main" warehouse and in another one or more warehouses, Solid Commerce will first check which warehouse can ship the complete order and will route the order to that warehouse.

If more than one warehouse can complete the order, Solid Commerce will determine which warehouse is closer in proximity to the buyer and route the order to that warehouse.

NOTE:  Currently, this functionality is supported for warehouses only and not for Vendor warehouses.  We hope to add support for Vendor warehouses later in 2022.  Current functionality for vendor warehouses is found in this article Vendor Inventory Management

Steps for Enabling Routing Rules

The first step is to add the address information to each of the warehouses that you would like Solid Commerce to use in the routing logic. 

1.  Add address information to each warehouse by going to Products>Inventory Management. Select the warehouse and click "Edit" and populate all the address information including city, state and zip code.

      2. Save

      3. Go to:   Admin>Order Automation Rules>Routing Rules

    4. Toggle on each marketplace you wish to enable Routing Rules

    5.  Save

Steps for Custom Routing

By using Solid Commerce's Excel Add-in tool, you can upload custom routing to Channels Manager to specify the order of PO Sources to take precedence for fulfillment. 

Add a pipestem character  |   BEFORE and AFTER the warehouse name in the PO Source field. 

Turn off the Routing Rules under the Admin tab as well. 

1. Go to: Admin>Order Automation Rules>Routing Rules and turn the toggle to off for the appropriate marketplace.
2. Open Excel Add-in tool and in the PO Sources field, add the pipestem followed by the specific warehouse names to take precedence for fulfillment and include a pipestem character after the last warehouse name.

In the example below, note the pipestem character is before the South Warehouse and after the FBA Warehouse. Orders will route to the South Warehouse for fulfillment if inventory is available, and only moving to the Main Warehouse if no inventory is available in the South Warehouse.

NOTE: You are only able to set up the Custom Routing via the Excel Add-In Tool, not through the User Interface Excel Add-In Tool

Troubleshooting: 

Order didn't route as expected:

1. Retrieve your PO sources into a spreadsheet to check if you have a pipe symbol before the first warehouse

2. Validate when the order came in and if you had inventory in each warehouse at that time

3. If you are using the pipe symbol in your po sources, validate that you also do not have on Routing Rules under Admin>Order Automation Rules>Routing Rules. You should not use both the pipe symbol and the routing rules at the same time. 

4. If you have FBA as a po source, there is not a way to do proxmity routing as we do not know where the Amazon warehouse are located. 

Related Articles:

Vendor Inventory Management

Excel Add-In Tool