If you're a brand with multiple retail stores, you already have something most ecommerce businesses pay a lot of money for: a distributed network of inventory locations close to your customers.

The challenge is putting that network to work. Inventory sitting in a Houston store can't help a customer who ordered online and lives in Dallas. A 3PL in New Jersey shouldn't be shipping to customers in Los Angeles if your San Francisco store has the same item in stock.

Order Routing Plus lets you connect all of your fulfillment locations — retail stores, flagship warehouses, and 3PL partners — into one intelligent routing system, all within Shopify.

📈 The Opportunity

• Brands using ship-from-store reduce overall fulfillment costs significantly — Target reported a 40% drop in fulfillment costs after using stores as distribution hubs
• Slow-moving retail store inventory is one of the biggest margin killers for multi-location brands — routing online orders through those locations converts deadstock into sales
• Shipping from the nearest location to the customer cuts transit time and carrier costs
• A unified inventory view across all locations means fewer stockouts, fewer lost sales, and better forecasting

🧩 Real-World Scenarios

Fashion brand with 6 stores: An online order for a jacket comes in from a customer in Chicago. The Chicago store has 4 units in stock — the routing rule assigns the order there. It ships same day, arrives the next morning. The warehouse in Ohio never needs to touch it.

End-of-season clearance: A brand's Miami store is sitting on 30 units of a winter coat that isn't selling locally. A routing rule tags those SKUs to route online orders to Miami first. Within two weeks, sell-through is complete — no markdown needed.

3PL as safety net: A brand's three retail stores all run out of a popular item during a flash sale. Order Routing Plus’ advanced routing rules automatically fall through to the 3PL, which ships from its warehouse. The customer experience is seamless.

Mixed fulfillment: A customer orders two items — one only stocked at the East coast store, one only available at the West coast warehouse. the app splits the order automatically, creates two fulfillment orders, and both tracking numbers sync back to the customer's order confirmation.

🔄 How It Works

This is an intelligent multi-node fulfillment model — one Shopify store, multiple fulfillment locations, smart routing.

1. You likely have already configured all your retail stores in your Shopify account, each store as it’s own location
2. When a customer places an order online, Order Routing Plus’ routing rules evaluate all available inventory locations and assign the order to the best one depending on predefined logic