Stores
A market can have multiple stores. In this section, you will learn how stores work and how you can leverage them to map your market's physical point of sales and successfully handle in-store transactions.
Stores
A store belongs to a specific market. You can use stores to map the market's physical shops (e.g. retail stores, pop-up stores, etc.) and effectively manage in-store sales.
Optionally, stores can be associated with a different merchant (otherwise the merchant will be inherited from the associated market), a store-specific stock location, and one or more store-specific payment methods.
A store can be put in scope when requesting an access token so that all the fetched resources (e.g. SKUs, prices) are automatically filtered by the market the store is associated with, orders are associated with the store in scope, and the stock and provided payment options are updated accordingly.
Stock management
If the store has its own stock location you can consider it like a small warehouse with stock replenishment processes already in place that adds up to the ones you are already using in your market. When calculating the stock availability, the associated market stock locations hierarchy is extended by adding the store's stock location as the one with the highest priority.
If the store has no stock location, the associated market's stock location hierarchy (as defined in the related inventory model) is used as a fallback.
This logic enables you to check the store's stock first (if any), but also sell from your store items that are not physically in-store leveraging the inventory model of the associated market to make the entire inventory accessible from your physical locations (e.g. endless aisle).
Available payment methods
You can decide to enable specific payment methods for a store. When a store is in scope, the returned available payment methods are the store's ones only, if any. If the store has no payment method enabled, the associated market's payment methods will be returned as the available payment methods for the store.
Shipments management
Shipments generated from orders belonging to a store, that have no stock transfers and only stock items associated with the store's stock location (e.g. that are physically available in-store) are automatically considered dispatched to the customer directly from the store operator, meaning that they don't need to be associated with any shipping method and are marked as delivered as soon as the related order is placed.
If some of the items are not available in-store but are available in one of the other stock locations of the market, different scenarios can occur based on the selected inventory strategy. For example:
- Ship from primary — stock transfers will be created from the other market's stock location to the store's stock location (automatically set as primary) where the customer can come and pick up the missing items when the stock transfers are completed.
- Split shipments — the missing item will be sent to the customer's shipping address.