Split shipments

Solidus supports split shipments out of the box. This feature addresses the needs of complex Solidus stores who require detailed inventory management, and sophisticated shipping and warehouse logic. It also allows you to manage shipments from multiple stock locations.

Spree::Stock::SimpleCoordinator contains all of the business logic for how stock should be packaged. If your store requires a specialized flow for handling split shipments, the simple coordinator should provide a good starting point for customizations.

Creating proposed shipments

An order's shipments are determined by Spree::Stock::SimpleCoordinator while the Spree::Order's' state is set to delivery. This occurs before the customer has completed their order at checkout.

The SimpleCoordinator takes an order and builds as many shipments as are necessary to fulfill it.

The simple coordinator performs a number of tasks in order to create shipment proposals:

1. The coordinator checks the availability of the ordered items.
2. Inventory is allocated from available stock to the current order.
3. It splits the order into logical packages based on stock locations and inventory at those locations.
4. Each package generates a new Spree::Shipment object that is associated with the current order.
5. It estimates the shipping rates for each shipment.

After the proposed shipments have been determined, the customer can continue the checkout process and take the order from the delivery state to the payment state.

Stock Locations

Stock locations considered while building shipments are configurable via a Stock Locations Filter class. Since the order of stock locations is important to determine which stock items needs to be picked up first, there is also a Stock Locations Sorter class that is easily customizable as well.

Splitters

In order to split shipments, Solidus runs a series of splitters in sequence. The first splitter in the sequence takes the array of packages from the order, splits the order into packages according to its rules, then passes the packages on to the next splitter in the sequence.

For each generated shipment, a shipping method can be assigned.

Default splitters

Solidus comes with three built-in splitters:

• Backordered splitter : Splits an order based on the amount of inventory on hand at each stock location.
• Shipping category splitter : Splits an order into shipments based on a product's shipping categories. This means that each package only has items that belongs to the same shipping category.
• Weight splitter : Splits an order into shipments based on a weight threshold. This means that each shipment has a maximum weight: if a new item is added to the order and it causes a package to go over the weight threshold, a new shipment is created. Each shipment needs to weigh less than the threshold. You can set the weight threshold by changing the Spree::Stock::Splitter::Weight.threshold value in an initializer. (It defaults to 150.)

Custom splitters

Note that splitters can be customized. Create you own splitter by inheriting the Spree::Stock::Splitter::Base class.

For an example of a simple splitter, take a look at Solidus's weight splitter . This splitter ensures that items that weigh more than 150 are split into their own shipment.

After you create your splitter, you need to add it to the array of splitters that Solidus uses. To do this, add the following to your config/initializers/spree.rb file:

    
      Rails.application.config.spree.stock_splitters << Spree::Stock::Splitter::CustomSplitter

    
  

You can also override the splitters used in Solidus, rearrange them, or otherwise customize them from the config/initializers/spree.rb:

    
      Rails.application.config.spree.stock_splitters = [
  Spree::Stock::Splitter::CustomSplitter,
  Spree::Stock::Splitter::ShippingCategory
]

    
  

If you want to add different splitters for each of your Spree::StockLocations, you can decorate the Spree::Stock::SimpleCoordinator class and override the splitters method.

Turn off split shipments

If you don't want to split packages in any case, you can set the config.spree.stock_splitters option to an empty array:

    
      Rails.application.config.spree.stock_splitters = []