How to Solve Multi-Origin Shipping at the Checkout for Magento and WooCommerce Stores

As businesses grow they expand, and with expansion comes the need for more fulfillment centers and warehouses. And this is the point when shipping becomes more complicated. However, with the use of shipping software, multi-origin shipping can become very cost-effective and flexible.
Do you know how to manage multi-origin shipping for your locations and which e-commerce platforms offer multi-origin shipping?

With multi-origin shipping, e-commerce businesses can select the optimal origin of the shipment if more warehouses are available. To better manage multiple warehouses you will need to set up shipping methods for each of your warehouses. If you enable multi-origin shipping, the order could be split between two or more locations. Customers will only see one shipping rate instead of multiple shipping rates.

The problem with multi-origin shipping is shipping costs and shipping rates. How is shipping cost calculated if the products are shipped from multiple locations to one destination? Let's see how multi-origin shipping works.

Imagine the order consists of products stored in different locations or warehouses, for example, New York and Los Angeles. The algorithm will select the best carriers and shipping options for each product to be shipped to the customer from multiple locations. As an e-commerce owner, you will want to avoid paying two separate shipping costs for orders shipped from multiple locations. Some retailers can afford to do multi-origin shipping this way but most can not.

Unless you are willing to calculate everything manually, you will need a multi-origin shipping solution to obtain real-time rates and bake them into one shipping rate. Multi-origin shipping will help you split the order, create the different shipping profiles for each order, and bake the costs into one unified shipping rate displayed at the checkout for your customer.

No, Magento supports only shipping from 1 location by default. Magento offers a multi-source inventory, which is slightly different from multi-origin shipping. The multi-source inventory gives control over your product inventory. It helps maintain quantities for sales, handle shipments to complete orders better, track your inventory stock, provide stock amounts, and ship according to recommendations based on distance or priority.

Calcurates multi-origin shipping is fully compatible with Magento multi-source inventory.

WooCommerce offers a feature called Advanced Shipping Packages. The feature allows the retailer to split the shopping cart into more “packages” and ship each package with its own shipping rate and shipping method. The only solution here is to split the shopping cart and ship items separately. Customers will see different shipping options for each split order, “package”. The rest of the products will be shipped in a bundle, if not specified otherwise. WooCommerce Advanced Shipping allows users to take advantage of free shipping for certain items as well.

Other than using Advanced Shipping Packages, functions such as WooCommerce multiple shipping addresses are not supported.

Any retailer shipping from multiple locations can benefit from using the Calcurates multi-origin shipping feature. Calcurates obtains real-time shipping rates from your locations and displays a single rate at the checkout for your customers.

With multi-origin shipping, the retailer can ship items depending on the origin-based shipping method, origin selection based on the stock quantity, origin selection based on the distance, and minimize the number of origins for the order.

Currently, Calcurates supports multi-origin shipping on Magento 2 and WooCommerce. For Shopify e-commerce owners we offer multi-vendor shipping for Shopify.