Sales channels and warehouses

With one warehouse the question does not exist: everything ships from there. With two or more the module has to decide which building fulfils an order, and it does so from channel assignment, priorities and the building’s capabilities.

Channel assignment

Stockly → Warehouses → warehouse → General → Assigned sales channels.

A building becomes a candidate for a channel by being assigned to it, and an order from a channel the building is not assigned to is not allocated there.

The exception is a channel to which no warehouse at all is assigned: every active warehouse is then a candidate for it. This is what makes a shop with a single warehouse work without any assignment, and it is also why assigning one building to a channel takes every other building out of that channel.

Assignment is the simplest way to separate online sales from shop-floor sales: the shop floor gets its own channel, and the central warehouse serves the web shop.

Priorities

Priority decides the order in which the module reaches for buildings. A lower number means earlier. There are two levels:

1. Priority on the General tab — the building’s priority, applied everywhere.
2. Priority per sales channel — an override for a single channel. An empty field inherits the building’s priority, and the placeholder shows exactly which value is being inherited.

The same building can therefore be the first choice for one channel and a last resort for another, without any extra rules.

What priority cannot override

Priority works inside what a building can do at all. A warehouse with Ships to customers switched off does not receive an order for dispatch, regardless of how low its priority is and how much stock it holds, because parcels do not leave that building. Where no capable building remains at all, the module still has to record the demand somewhere, so it allocates the order and marks the decision as degraded.

The same goes for transfers: a building with Can send stock to other warehouses switched off will not be proposed as a replenishment source. → Warehouse settings

Additional rules

When channel assignment and priorities are not enough, sourcing rules take over, for instance to send every order above a given value from head office, or to have one country served by one building only. → Sourcing rules

Why it went there

Every decision about which building to use is recorded with its reason. Where an order was allocated differently than expected, the answer is under Settings → Diagnostics → Sourcing decisions: the chosen building, the alternatives considered and why each was rejected. → Sourcing decision log