Skip to content

Supplier stock releases

Elevate plan

A supplier stock release (SSR) is the order type you use to pull stock that’s physically still at the supplier but already owned by you into one of your warehouse locations. It’s the counterpart to a PO line set to Supplier-held fulfillment: that PO registers the inventory as buyer-owned supplier-held stock; an SSR later releases it.

If your supplier never holds your stock — i.e., every PO is delivered straight to your warehouse — you don’t need SSRs.

  • When to use an SSR
  • Where supplier-held stock comes from
  • What you can do here
  • Key concepts
  • See also

You hold stock at your supplier — through buy-ahead, batch production, or pre-positioning — and want to call some of it down to your own warehouse. The SSR captures the request, the shipment, and the receipt, and (optionally) syncs the received warehouse quantity back to Shopify on-hand.

Supplier-held stock positions are created when you receive a PO whose line fulfillment mode is Supplier-held. Instead of incrementing warehouse on-hand, the receipt creates (or grows) a supplier_stock_position row with ownershipType = buyer_owned. That balance is what SSRs draw from.

Consignment positions (ownershipType = supplier_owned_consignment) live in the same table but cannot be released via an SSR — they’re tracked separately.

  • Supplier-held stock position — your inventory physically located at the supplier. Created from PO receipts when the PO line’s fulfillment mode is Supplier-held.
  • Release — the order that moves supplier-held stock from the supplier to one of your warehouses.
  • Release line item — one variant + requested quantity on the release.
  • Allocation — the link from a release line item to one or more supplier-held stock positions; consumed as the SSR is received.
  • Destination location — the warehouse where the release will land. Required before you can send the release.