How to Manage Shopify Multi-Vendor Shipping With a an App

Multi-vendor shipping requires lots of planning, managing, and monitoring. The hardest part though is the shipping process. Shopify has a limited choice of multi-vendor shipping apps. Shopify Shipping itself doesn’t offer multi-vendor shipping. So, how can you solve multi-vendor shipping for Shopify's e-commerce store? Multi-vendor shipping can be solved with a third-party Shopify shipping app.

Multi-vendor shipping is a term used when products are shipped to a customer from two or more vendors from various locations. Multi-vendor shipping is about managing and calculating shipping rates based on multiple shipping methods from different locations or warehouses.

A multi-vendor marketplace allows you to "build marketplace" with more vendors to your existing e-commerce store on any e-commerce platform. Multi-vendor marketplace apps help you automate the whole shipping process, including fulfillment, payment, and order management.

The multi-vendor store offers products from multiple vendors under one roof with a unified shipping policy. Usually, as a multi-vendor store manager, you do not keep products in your own storehouse. In this case, you simply act as a moderator between the vendor and the customer. Thus, you might consider a multi-vendor shipping app to help you with the automation of the shipping process.

The majority of the Shopify apps have default shipping options such as flat rates, table rates, and multiple carriers to add to your account. But how would you calculate shipping rates for a multi-vendor store?
Imagine your customer from Pittsburgh orders products from different cities in the United States:

There are a couple of problems that arise here. First, shipping costs will consist of two shipments. Second, how is the order going to be dispatched from different vendors? Third, what if you need to use more carriers?

Shopify Shipping does not offer multi-vendor shipping. So, that is not an option here. A key to managing multi-vendor shipping efficiently is a third-party Shopify shipping app. Calcurates can help you automate the whole multi-vendor shipping process. Our multi-origin shipping feature includes origin-based shipping methods, origin selection based on the stock quantity and distance, and more.

Shopify is a very easy-to-use e-commerce platform to build your e-commerce store. By default, Shopify only allows the user to ship from a single location. This means that shipping costs are calculated as if shipped from a single location. Likewise, the application of shipping options and methods to optimize the multi-vendor shipping process is not possible. The e-commerce owner should have a say when it comes to the application of shipping options and methods. The right shipping option ensures that the profit won't be wiped out by the shipping costs completely.

Shopify does not support multi-vendor shipping, you will need a third-party multi-vendor shipping app.