How to Set Up Multiple Warehouses

If your 3PL or eComm fulfillment business has multiple locations, setting them up correctly in ShipHero is key to ensuring accurate inventory counts, smooth order fulfillment, and peace of mind. The first step is to create the additional locations in your ShipHero account. Then you can decide how to route your orders, create products, and manage inventory between them.

Things to Consider

• Activation Required: Before getting started, you must reach out to ShipHero support to enable multi-warehouse functionality on your account. If you do not, you will not have the option "Create a new warehouse" in the dropdown module.
• Supported Account Types: You must be a 3PL, Brand or a Hybrid account to enable the multi-warehouse feature.
• Note for 3PLs: Please visit this article for more information on How to Connect an Additional Warehouse to a 3PL client 

Table of Contents

• How to Create an Additional Warehouse
• Basic Multi-Warehouse Set-Up (Legacy)
• Multi-Warehouse Allocation (Preferred)
• Frequently Asked Questions

How to Create an Additional Warehouse

Reminder for 3PLs: Ensure you have All selected in the customer dropdown. If a client account is selected, the option to create a new default profile warehouse will not be available.

1. Go to My Account > Warehouses page.
2. Click the Add A Warehouse button on the top right side of the page.
3. Select "default" from the Profile dropdown and  "Create a new Warehouse" from the Warehouse dropdown.
4. Type in your warehouse's Name, i.e., NY Warehouse or Seattle Location, and hit OK. (This is your warehouse's identifier and cannot be changed later)
5. Select Continue and complete the details for the new warehouse.
6. When you are finished, select Save Warehouse at the bottom right.

Basic Multi-Warehouse Set-Up (Legacy)

There are three basic ways you can structure order allocation with multiple warehouses:

1. Set a Primary Warehouse: All orders are assigned to the primary warehouse, and products are only created in the primary warehouse. You manually add products and assign orders to the other warehouses as needed.
2. Assign by Priority: Orders are assigned by Priority. Orders go to the highest priority warehouse with the stock needed to ship your order. 
3. Assign by Closest: Orders go to the closest warehouse with the stock needed to ship the order.

On the Order Details page, there will be two columns: the Allocated Warehouse and the Locked Warehouse. The Locked Warehouse will show as System Will Assign, which means the system will follow the rules specified above. However, you can choose a particular warehouse to override the system rules.

More information on the Allocated Warehouse and Locked Warehouse can be found HERE  ckquote

Multi-Warehouse Allocation (Recommended)

Activation Required: you MUST contact ShipHero Support to enable Multi-Warehouse Allocation (MWA) on your account.

Note for 3PLs: The Multi-Warehouse Allocation setting must be enabled at the client level. 

Multi-Warehouse Allocation (MWA) is a set of rules that determines which warehouse items on an order should be allocated or backordered. To access the Multi-Warehouse Allocation rules page, go to Shipping.shiphero.com and select MW Allocation on the left menu.

Common Use Cases:

• You have multiple warehouses and need advanced rules to determine where items should be shipped from.
• You share a 3PL Client with another 3PL that also uses ShipHero.

Similar to automation rules, multi-warehouse rules have Conditions and Actions. The Conditions define which orders will get processed by that rule, and the Actions define what will be done with the items on the order.

Unlike automation rules, only one multi-warehouse allocation rule will be executed per order, so their priority will be determined by the order in which they appear in the list. 

Please visit our article on How to Use Multi Warehouse Allocation Rules for more detailed information on how to set them up and manage your orders. 

Frequently Asked Questions

Where can I see the warehouse assigned to an order?

There are multiple ways to see which orders and line items on an order are associated with which warehouse in ShipHero. Below are the most common ways to view the information.

1. On the Orders > Manage Orders page, there is a Warehouses column; there, you will see which orders are assigned to which warehouse. 

   

2. On the Orders > Manage Order page, you can also filter by warehouse or see if an order is allocated to ship from multiple locations.
3. On the Orders > Pending Shipments screen, you can see what shipments are ready to ship from a particular warehouse.

How do I change the warehouse assigned to an order?

The type of multi-warehouse setup you choose will determine how you can change an order's allocation. Below are examples of how to do it for each.

Changing Allocated Warehouse Using the Basic MW Setup

For accounts using the Basic Multi-Warehouse set up, which allows the system to assign orders based on your preferences, there is an additional column on the Order Details page called Locked Warehouse.

1. Open the order that needs to be updated.
2. Select the desired warehouse from the Locked Warehouse dropdown for each SKU that needs to be reallocated.
3. Click the Save Changes button, located under the order total section. 

Changing Allocated Warehouse Using MWA Rules

For accounts using Multi Warehouse Allocation Rules to reassign an order, you must first have a rule with a condition to trigger how you want the order to be allocated, make the necessary adjustments to the order (if needed), and then reprocess the order.

For more detiailed information, visit our article on How to Use Multi Warehouse Allocation Rules.

For example, if we want to reallocate an order assigned to the Seattle warehouse to the Primary warehouse.

1. Create the MWA rule: 
   • Condition: Select "If Order contains tags:" and type in the tag Primary; remember to hit enter to save the tag in the field.
   • Action: Then Allocate and from single warehouse and Backorder and select the Primary warehouse in the From Warehouses dropdown.
   • Click Save and Name your MWA Rule.
2. Add the Tag to the Order: In the Order Tags section, on the Order Details page, add the Primary tag to the order and hit enter. Then click Save Tags. 

3. Reprocess the Order: In the Actions section, on the order details page click the Reprocess button. Reprocessing the order triggers the MWA rules to run for that order and for the reallocation process to start.

   Adding an Order Tag	Reprocessing an Order

NOTE: Depending on the number of SKUs on the order the reallocation process in the backend may take some time to update in the Order Details page. If you do not see the allocation/backordered numbers update as expected, please wait a few moments and then hit Reprocess on the order from the actions section.