Understanding Order, Fulfillment and Inventory Locations

Order Locations and Fulfillment Locations are not the same.

The fundamental difference between an Order Location and a Fulfillment Location is that an order location does not fulfill the order; it dispatches the order to the appropriate fulfillment location.

An order location is a Point of Sale that an order is awarded to. The Order Location "owns" that order. The fulfillment location holds the inventory that is required to fulfill the order: it carries out the process of fulfilling and delivering the order to the customer.

The Order Location of an order is the virtual or physical store to which the sale should be associated. This is different from the Fulfillment Location from which the products will be sourced to complete the order.

Figure 1 - Example of a Commerce Modeler with stores and fulfillment locations,

Fulfillment Locations

Fulfillment Location entities are implicitly created along with their Store or Warehouse entity counterparts. These entities are used to represent a physical location (either store or warehouse) that contain product stock and are equipped to fulfill orders. Each fulfillment location can be configured individually to specify their supported fulfillment types (Shipping, Delivery, Pick Up, or Ship-to-Store) and hours of operation.

Depending on the Fulfillment Type selected by the customer and/or inventory availability, multiple Fulfillment Locations might be required to fulfill one order.

A fulfillment location entity (of type Store) representing the fulfillment operations of a physical store (not virtual stores). A store entity always has an associated fulfillment location for which related options may be configured. A fulfillment location of type store is linked to a single scope.

A fulfillment location entity (of type Warehouse) representing the fulfillment operations of a warehouse. A warehouse entity always has an associated fulfillment location for which related options may be configured. A fulfillment location of type warehouse may be linked to multiple scopes.

Inventory Locations

An inventory location is created and associated to a fulfillment location if inventory and inventory reservations are configured to be evaluated and processed for products at this location. When enabling inventory tracking for a fulfillment location, the inventory position of a SKU will be tracked from within Commerce Cloud or from an external source using another inventory provider.

When creating an order being fulfilled from such a fulfillment location, the system will evaluate the availability of line items based on the above details.

Figure 2 - Stores/Warehouse, fulfillment and inventory locations