When does Shopify's native order routing stop being enough? 7 signs your stores have outgrown it.
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Shopify's built in order routing works well for a brand that ships everything from a single warehouse. Once you start adding stores, a second country or another warehouse, however, it begins to limit the logistics decisions your business requires. Below are seven signs that it is time to add an orchestration layer beneath it.
The short answer
Shopify's native order routing stops being enough when you fulfil from three or more locations, hold stock in more than one country, or sell across both wholesale and direct to consumer. At that point you need live stock from every location, routing rules you control without a developer, and automatic handling of the exceptions a store creates every day. You do not need to replace Shopify or your ERP to get any of it.
What Shopify's routing does well
Credit where it is due. Shopify Plus supports up to 200 locations and gives you a sensible set of default rules: minimise split fulfilments, keep orders within the customer's market, ship from the closest location, or follow a ranked list of locations you choose. If you ship from one warehouse, or two that rarely overlap, that is all you need.
The trouble starts when your business evolves and its requirements become more complex. Each new store, country or sales channel adds decisions that Shopify's defaults were never designed to make, and your team ends up making them by hand
The seven signs you have outgrown it
1. You are overselling items that showed as in stock
Shopify's own documentation says order routing does not prevent overselling. Store stock in Shopify is only as accurate as the last count or sync. When a customer buys the last pair that was actually sold over the counter an hour ago, you pay for it twice: once in the refund and again in the customer you lose.
2. Orders are going to the wrong store
Shopify measures "closest location" in a straight line. It does not know that one store has a courier collection at 3pm and another has none, or that your busiest shop cannot pick online orders on a Saturday. The closest store on a map is often not the right store to fulfil from.
3. International orders keep landing on your oldest location
When Shopify cannot match a customer's address to coordinates, the closest location rule is skipped and your oldest location is used instead. Shopify notes this happens more often outside the United States. If you sell across the UK, Europe or Australia, that fallback quietly sends orders from the wrong place.
4. Your best routing rules live in someone's head
"Never ship from the flagship in December." "Keep two units back in every store for walk in customers." "Send anything over 20kg from the warehouse." Every multi store retailer has rules like these. In Shopify, custom routing logic is still in early access and available to merchants only through the Partner programme, so most of those rules get applied by hand, if at all.
5. Your team spends every morning fixing yesterday's orders
Items that could not be found, orders that split badly, addresses that changed after dispatch, click and collect orders sitting at the wrong store. If someone's job has become clearing these by hand, you are paying a person to do what software should be doing.
6. You turn away sales because stock is on its way, not on the shelf
If a product is out of stock today but arriving on Thursday, you should still be able to sell it. RANDEMRETAIL's Back Order module lets you keep taking orders against incoming stock and allocates units to those customers as soon as they land, instead of hiding the product and losing the sale.
7. Wholesale, phone and in store requests live outside the system
A trade customer emails an order. A shopper rings the store asking for an item from another branch. If those orders are keyed in by hand somewhere else, they never benefit from your routing or your live stock. RANDEMRETAIL's Draft Order module brings them into the same flow, so every order follows the same rules no matter where it started.
Opening your first stores? Set this up first
Digital first brands often open their first shops with the same setup they used online, then spend a year untangling it. If stores are on your roadmap, put four things in place before the first one opens: live stock per location, routing rules you can change yourself, click and collect from day one, and a plan for same day delivery from each shop. It costs far less to start this way than to fix it after the tenth store.
You do not need to replatform to fix this
Most retailers who hit these signs get told the grown up answer is a large OMS programme that takes most of a year and a systems integrator to deliver. We do not think that is true, and our clients have proved it is not.
RANDEMRETAIL is an eCommerce orchestration platform built natively on Shopify and BigCommerce. It sits underneath Shopify checkout and POS and alongside your ERP, reads live stock from every location, and sends each order to the location that should fulfil it, using rules you set. RANDEM ED, the AI inside the platform, handles the exceptions: rerouting orders, checking stock and updating statuses without anyone stitching screens together. You switch on the modules you need, including Back Order, Draft Order, click and collect, ship from store and same day delivery.
SKIMS, Cass Art, Big R and Feeders Supply run on it today. When The Bike Shop moved five stores from BigCommerce to Shopify Plus, its order flows came across without rebuilding a single integration. Most clients are live in weeks, not quarters.
Frequently asked questions
When does Shopify's native order routing stop being enough?
What can't Shopify's native order routing do?
Why do orders still go wrong when I add more stores?
Can I take back orders on Shopify Plus?
What should a digital-first brand set up before opening stores?
Do I need to replace Shopify or my ERP?
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Not sure whether you have outgrown it?
Send us a month of orders and your store list. On a 20 minute call we will show you where each order went, and where RANDEMRETAIL would have sent it