Fulfilling Multiple Shipping Address Orders 📦
When a multiple shipping address order is placed in your store, your fulfillment process remains unchanged. However, it is important to understand the process of how these orders are generated, and how they display in your order queue.
When a multiple shipping address order is placed, all of the data for the order comes into your store via a single order. To then create orders per shipping address (so that you can fulfill orders on a per shipping address basis) the initial order is canceled and new orders are recreated per shipping address.
There will therefore be a single ‘parent’ order, and multiple ‘child’ orders depending on how many shipping addresses exist in the order.
This is how a a multiple shipping address order going to 2 address will look in your order queue when received:
You can see here that the ‘parent’ order #1053 is automatically canceled, and the ‘child’ orders #1054 and #1055 are created by Multiship.
The ‘parent’ order is tagged with ms_order, standing for multiple shipping.
The ‘child’ orders are tagged with ms_fulfillment_order, along with a tag that indicated the ‘parent’ order that it has been generated from. In this case, created_from_#1053.
If you open the ‘parent’ order #1053 you will see at the bottom that Multiship has canceled this order:
Even though the order has been canceled, it has not been refunded. This is the order through which money has come into your store. But the initial order should largely be ignored, as it is not to be fulfilled. To understand more about how refunds can be processed through multiple shipping address orders, please review this article:
If you open one of the ‘child’ orders, #1054, you will see a note that this order was placed through Multiship.
Taking a look at how order data is passed through to the ‘child’ order, you will see that everything renders in exactly the same place as what you would expect for a regular, one-address Shopify order:
This ensures that fulfillment can proceed as normal.
***Please note, despite a charge being present here, your customer has not been charged again – this is a recreated order marked pre-paid.
To understand more about viewing reports when taking into consideration multiple shipping address orders, please review this article: