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.