Multi-location inventory on Shopify

Once a store has a warehouse and two retail locations, “quantity” stops being a single number. Shopify tracks stock per location, and every adjustment carries a reason so the history explains itself.

A bulk inventory tool that writes totals without locations or reasons is worse than useless: it produces numbers that look right and cannot be audited.

What a location-aware edit does

• Targets a specific location rather than a total.
• Sets or adjusts quantity by amount.
• Writes a reason code — correction, cycle count, damaged, quality control, received, restock, shrinkage, promotion, movement or reservation events.
• Can change tracking and inventory policy in the same task.
• Records the previous quantity per variant, so the task is revertible.

Selecting the right variants

• By location, to work one site at a time.
• By total quantity — more than, less than, equal to.
• By “out of stock somewhere” — the variants that are zero in at least one location.
• By SKU or barcode, when reconciling against a supplier or a stocktake sheet.
• By collection, vendor or type to scope the job.

A worked example: receive a delivery at one location

1. Filter: vendor is “Northwind”, SKU contains “NWD-”.
2. Editor: inventory quantity → adjust by amount, increase by 12, location “Main warehouse”, reason “received”.
3. Preview the variants against the delivery note.
4. Run it. Shopify’s inventory history now shows a received adjustment rather than an unexplained jump.

Why reasons matter later

Six months on, the difference between “shrinkage” and “correction” is the difference between a security question and a data-entry question. Reason codes cost nothing at write time and save a lot of guessing at audit time.

Inventory limits count per variant, so a large multi-location correction may need a higher plan.

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