Organize products on packing slips/pick lists by the order they are located in the warehouse

[ohelsbells]

I organized our shop floor by attributing warehouse locations to each area. I did this alphabetically, creating over 20 zones. After this, I uploaded a spreadsheet to our inventory, attributing the appropriate warehouse location to each item in our inventory. We have about 800 items. 

My goal in doing this was not to create extra work for myself but to be able to pick our orders in the exact order that they are arranged on our shop floor. The packing slip is my preferred document to work with when picking orders because it has all the customer and order information on it.

I was under the impression that because there is an option to sort packing slips and pick lists by "warehouse location" that it would sort the products on the order by their location in the warehouse. This should absolutely be a feature for making it easier to pick items on orders. It would make it so much easier for businesses that have large warehouses with tons of product and for smaller businesses like ourselves that have a ton of different products and receive many orders each day. This way, we aren't running back and forth picking items on the list that could be organized by location on the slip.

To be totally honest, I invested a TON of my time making sure that our inventory had appropriate warehouse location attributions, and had to reach out to SS support several times to make sure it would work the way I was hoping it would. I feel like I did all this extra work in vain to accomplish something that could be easily automated, but isn't.

[chris41]

I did the same thing with our products, originally for the pick list. Our packing slip "Order Items By" option is set to "None" to keep the original order, but I just tested by switching it to "Warehouse Location" and printing a packing slip, and it did rearrange the order to follow the warehouse locations. Make sure your order items are attaching to the shipstation product records, the name should be a clickable link that pops up the product record. Also try setting one of the other "Order Items By" options and see if it changes the sort order of your packing list.

[ohelsbells]

Thanks Chris!

I did change the sorting method on the packing slip (higher quantity first) and it was reflected on the slip. I noticed a small issue when printing the packing slip after changing the sort method back to warehouse location. The location zones in our warehouse DO show up on the packing slip, but it's still not in a proper alphabetical order, like I was hoping. I'll investigate the help articles further and keep digging. It seems the more questions I get answered, the more I end up having.

I also noticed some of the products' locations were "not tracked" on the packing slip. This was a result of me manually entering product information a while back before uploading the csv file that attributed warehouse zones to each product, so I went into each of those untracked products and unclicked the box that says "do not track inventory". Now every product is tracked and all of them are attributed to a warehouse location. Figured it might be helpful for someone else that's having a hard time figuring out why their products aren't allocating.

[TheVegBox]

Hi Did anyone get any further with this. Seems really silly you can't organise the warehouse in alphabetical order with the product locations.

[ohelsbells]

10000% Thank you.

I have submitted five different support tickets asking about the functionality and if there was anything wrong with the way I have set up our inventory. I have received information ranging from "yes it does work that way!" to "no, it unfortunately doesn't work the way you're describing". My recent support ticket about this has been escalated to senior support, and I haven't heard anything about it for the past couple weeks. I'm hoping they're really poking around to figure out why it isn't working or making it work the way it ideally should. Seems like they are since the packing slip has been sorted by "warehouse location" after I change it to "name", because that's easier to pick from for the time being. I will keep the thread posted! 

[CaraAdmin]

Hello @ohelsbells!

I appreciate your support for this feature request. We’ve passed it along to our development team for review.

Stay tuned! 

Happy Shipping!

-Cara

[ohelsbells]

Thank you! I've been in contact with some members of your client success team over the past couple months who have been updating me on the warehouse location sort functionality. Many of us clients are anxious for it's launch, especially since the holidays are the busiest time of the year for most retail companies. Hoping to see a successful launch as we fuss with orders over the next few months!

[CaraAdmin]

Hello everyone!

I’m excited to share that this feature has officially launched! 

To enable it, follow these steps:
Settings → Printing → Print Setup → Pick List → Document Options → Warehouse Location → Use Inventory Location

Let us know if you have any questions! If you need any assistance or run into any issues, feel free to reach out to support@shipstation.com—we’re happy to help!

Happy Shipping!

-Cara

[zx11guy]

Hello Cara, 

We are new to ShipStation after using ShipWorks for 9 years. I was under the impression we could print packing slips in order of warehouse location, as the original poster on this forum was. 

We've always printed a packing slip on a 4x6 label, then pulled the order and kept the slip with it until the packing stage. Then the packer scans the barcode on the packing slip, then packs the order & prints the shipping label. 

Yesterday, support told me it is not possible to print packing slips in order of warehouse location. I can't believe that companies would be expected to zigzag around each end of the warehouse to pick each order instead of pulling them as you go down each row. This seems like a no-brainer.

Am I missing something here? I've fully customized our packing list so it has exactly what we need on it. The pick list is useless to us as it can't print one per order and is not customizable..

Any help would be greatly appreciated. We are a very seasonal business, and our season is about to break wide open. 

Ken

JetSki Plus

[ohelsbells]

Hey Ken!

I believe SS has made this functionality work for most clients. I assume you have created locations and attributed each product to a specific zone before turning the functionality on. From what I recall, there were some caveats for making it work, so it might be best to talk to a member of the client success team to make sure you're set up properly. 

We were not able to make it work because of the way we process orders and because I do not want SS to be tracking inventory for us. SS is a great shipping software, not an ideal inventory tracking solution for us. After I set up the warehouse 3 different ways, worked in about 6 different spreadsheets redoing work, and talked to several teams of people at SS, we ultimately decided to upgrade our inventory tracking software to enable barcode scanning and allow us to pick by warehouse location. I wish I didn't waste so much time trying to figure it out with SS, tbh. As a business owner, the one thing you don't want to waste trying to make software you're paying for work, is TIME. Including the amount of time I have spent in this thread...but if it helps someone else, I'm okay with that.

If you can't resolve it with a CSM at SS within like 2 weeks, I'd suggest finding an alternative.

[charlies_club]

I experienced the same thing. We added specific warehouse locations (Area, Unit, Shelf, Bin) hoping that when we print a pick list it would tell us where to find the product location (we have 800 SKUs). Instead, the pick list just calls out the warehouse the product is in (we only have one). The fact that the specific location fields exist tells me that this has to be possible. How do people in larger warehouses with more product find what they're looking for? 

Does anyone know how to code/customize the pick list to include this information, or any other hack to figure it out? 

[CaraAdmin]

Hello @charlies_club!

Thank you for following up on this feature request! I’ve spoken with the development team, and I’m happy to share that this feature is still in progress. We’re aiming for a launch by the end of the year. I’ll be sure to update the community as soon as it’s ready to go live. Thank you for your patience and support!

Happy Shipping!

-Cara

[CE-Chris]

Might be some setup, but you can enter values for your Warehouse Location on the shipping tab, (instead of Inventory).
This then allows you to group/sort by Warehouse Location, which allows your Pick List to flow in an order you can control.

 While this isnt true customization of the Packing Slip that you might want, it should be a viable solution to any kind of workflow from a pick list.