Store replenishment with Shopify POS and a 3PL

If your stock sits at a third-party warehouse and your stores run on Shopify POS, Shopify gives you everything to MOVE the stock and nothing to decide WHAT to move. This page is about that gap.

What Shopify already gives you

• Every place that holds stock is a location — including your 3PL warehouse. Once the 3PL is connected, its stock is readable like any other location, with no integration of your own.
• Every POS store is a location too, and its sales are attributed to it: you can tell what sold in a store from what shipped from the web.
• Inventory transfers move units between two locations, with a shipment and a reception, so what left and what arrived are two distinct facts.
• Stock levels per location are readable at any time, per variant — that is, per size.

What it does not give you

The decision. Nothing in the platform answers “given what each store sells, what it already holds and what is left at the warehouse, how many units of which size should go where this week?” That question is asked every week, per size and per store, and it is the one nobody has time for — so it gets answered by habit: equal splits, the loudest store manager, or last season’s grid.

Four traps, in the order they cost the most

1. The network average. A size curve computed across all stores hides the store that only sells small sizes. Replenishing on the average keeps that store broken and buries the sizes it would have sold.
2. A store that is out of stock sells zero. Ranking stores by recent sales rewards the ones that had stock and punishes the ones that ran out — which is exactly backwards. Days with no stock have to be excluded from the velocity, or the ranking becomes a memory of past allocations.
3. Warehouse lead time. A carton that takes six days to arrive covers a different horizon from one that arrives tomorrow. With a 3PL the lead time is real, it varies by store, and it changes what should be sent — not just when.
4. A broken size run is invisible. A product “in stock” with only XS and XL left keeps counting as available. Nothing turns red; the sale simply does not happen, and it never appears in any report.

A method you can run without any tool

1. Give every location a role: warehouse (including the 3PL), store, or neither. Anything unclassified will pollute every figure downstream.
2. For each store and each size, take the sales of the last few weeks, and ignore the days when that size was at zero in that store.
3. Turn that into a target: how many units of that size the store should hold to cover the time until the next shipment, plus the delivery lead time.
4. Subtract what is already there and what is already in transit. What remains is the need.
5. Confront the needs with what the warehouse actually holds. When it is short — it usually is — split proportionally to the needs, not equally between stores.
6. Write down what you sent and check, 30 days later, what was sold. That step is the only one that tells you whether the method works.

What Allocator does with it

Allocator runs those six steps every week on your own data, and shows the result as a reviewable list — every line with the reason it exists. It installs with NO permission to write: it reads your locations, your stock and your sales, and it cannot change anything in your store until you explicitly allow it to create transfers — Shopify asks you at that moment.

Book a demo — 30 min Install — read-only

Broken size runs in store (in French) · Store-to-store transfers on Shopify POS (in French) · Privacy policy · support@getallocator.com