Ship to a supplier

Elevate plan

A transfer order normally moves stock between two of your own locations. It can instead ship to a supplier, who receives the goods and holds them on your behalf: the stock leaves one of your locations, but instead of arriving at another one, it’s recorded as your stock sitting at that supplier.

Use it when you’re staging stock with a manufacturer, finisher, or 3PL before it goes back into a location — the mirror image of buying from one supplier and delivering to another, but starting from your own shelf instead of an order you place.

On this page

• What makes a TO a supplier-destination TO
• Creating one
• The holding supplier and its address
• Where these TOs show up
• Sending
• Receiving at the supplier
• Unreceiving
• What this does to your inventory numbers
• Documents and exports
• Limits
• See also

What makes a TO a supplier-destination TO

Every transfer order has an origin location. Its destination is normally another one of your locations — but it can be a supplier instead:

Flow	Feature
buy from supplier A → deliver to B	Deliver to another supplier (PO)
supplier → my location	Supplier stock releases
my location → supplier	This page

The goods really do leave your origin location — a supplier-destination TO decreases on-hand there exactly like any other transfer. What’s different is the other end: there’s no destination location to receive into, so the arrival is recorded as your stock held at the supplier instead.

Note

Shipping a transfer order to a supplier needs the Elevate plan — the goods are recorded as supplier-held stock, an Elevate capability. On a lower plan the option isn’t offered when creating or editing a TO. Orders you already have stay fully visible and workable: you can find them, receive them, export them — the plan only gates picking or changing the destination itself. A downgrade never silently rewrites an existing order’s destination back to a location.

Creating one

Open Supply Orders → Transfer Orders → Create Transfer Order → Create Empty TO, pick your origin location, then open the destination picker and choose Ship to a supplier (held as your stock) — it sits below your locations, described as “The supplier receives and holds the goods for you.” A Holding supplier field appears once you pick it.

You can also switch an existing TO onto this destination while it’s still Draft: open it, edit the header, and pick the same entry from the destination picker.

Those two places are the only ones. Create from Min/Max, Create from Forecast, Create from Sales, and Create from Orders all keep the ordinary two-location picker, and the CSV/XLSX importer refuses a supplier destination outright — “Imported transfer orders cannot ship to a supplier — create the transfer order from the transfer orders list and pick the destination supplier there.”

Copying a TO and Split Transfer Order both carry the destination, the holding supplier, and its address to the new order, so a copy or a split-off remainder stays sendable without re-picking anything.

The holding supplier and its address

The Holding supplier field lists your suppliers. Picking one snapshots its address onto the transfer order as the destination address — from then on it belongs to the TO, so you can edit it there if this shipment goes somewhere other than that supplier’s address on file, and your edit sticks.

If the holding supplier has no address on file, the TO’s Locations card shows No address on file for this supplier. Add one before sending. in place of an address, and sending is blocked until one exists.

Caution

The destination and the holding supplier can only be set or changed while the TO is Draft — changing them later is treated the same as changing the destination location itself, which the ordinary Draft-only editing rules already lock down. Switching a TO back to an ordinary location destination clears the holding supplier but keeps the address you had, as your own override.

Where these TOs show up

• Transfer orders list — an At supplier badge sits next to the TO number, and the list’s Destination filter gains a pinned At supplier entry above your real locations — the only way to filter these TOs in, since they have no destination location of their own. It stays available on every plan, so a shop that moves off Elevate can still find the orders it has.
• Detail page — the information card’s destination tile reads At supplier: <holder> instead of a location name, and the same badge sits beside the TO number. The Locations card’s To side shows the holder above the snapshotted address.
• Supply orders dashboard — wherever the dashboard shows a TO’s destination, these read At supplier: <holder> and are searchable by either “at supplier” or the holder’s name.
• Adjust incoming — this post-completion tool refuses on a supplier-destination TO with its own message: “This transfer order ships to a supplier, so no Shopify location carries incoming for it and there is nothing to adjust.” There’s simply no Shopify location to adjust.

Sending

Send needs all three of these before it will run, and names whichever is missing:

• An origin location — the goods still have to leave a warehouse.
• A holding supplier.
• An actionable address for that supplier (street, city, postal code, or country).

Receiving at the supplier

Receiving works through the same Receive Items dialog as any other TO — full or partial, one or several passes. The difference is where the quantity lands: it’s recorded as your stock at the holding supplier rather than moved into a Shopify location, so nothing changes in Shopify’s inventory at any point in the receive.

Note

Received quantities on a supplier-destination TO can’t be lowered from the receive dialog — the recorded stock at the supplier has to be reversed along with the received quantity, and that only happens safely through a status change. To correct an over-entered receive, use Revert to Sent to unreceive the line, then receive it again with the right quantity.

Unreceiving

Reverting a supplier-destination TO’s receipt removes the matching quantity from your recorded stock at the supplier — but only what’s still free to take back. If some of that stock has already moved on (reserved or released by a supplier stock release), the revert is refused rather than reaching into stock that’s no longer just sitting there.

What this does to your inventory numbers

• Origin on-hand decreases at Send, exactly like an ordinary transfer.
• Nothing happens at a Shopify location on the destination side, ever — there’s no destination location on this TO, so there’s nothing for Shopify to update there.
• No Shopify incoming is raised at any point. A supplier-destination TO doesn’t track incoming the way a warehouse TO does, because incoming exists to warn a location about stock headed its way, and there is no such location here.
• Forecasting: a location-scoped view of incoming never counts these TOs, since they have no destination location to count against. A shop-wide view of incoming keeps counting them while they’re open — the goods are still yours, just in transit to a supplier instead of a location.
• Once received, the stock appears under Suppliers → the holding supplier → Variants → My stock at supplier — the same place deliver-to-supplier purchase orders leave their held stock. A supplier stock release against that supplier is what eventually brings it into a location.

Documents and exports

• PDF — the To Location block gains a line: Deliver to: <holder>, holding these goods on our behalf.
• CSV / XLSX exports — seven Destination columns (company name, two address lines, city, ZIP, country, phone) carry the holding supplier’s snapshotted address on these TOs, and the ordinary destination location’s address on every other TO. Add them from a line-item or transfer-order-level export template like any other column. The existing To Location columns stay blank on a supplier-destination TO — there’s no location to read.

Limits

• Elevate plan required to create one or to switch a TO onto this destination.
• Only Create Empty TO and editing a Draft TO offer it — the min/max, forecast, sales, and from-orders creation flows, and the CSV/XLSX importer, don’t.
• The destination and holding supplier are Draft-only, locked once the TO is sent.
• One holding supplier per TO — there’s no splitting a shipment between a supplier and a location on the same order.
• Received quantities can only be lowered by reverting to Sent and receiving again, not directly in the receive dialog.
• Not available from a Shopify POS device — receive these TOs from the transfer order’s own detail page.

See also

• Deliver to another supplier — the purchase-order sibling this mirrors, and where the destination-address export columns pattern comes from.
• Supplier stock releases — bringing supplier-held stock into a location.
• Creating a TO — the rest of the creation paths.
• Search, filters & saved views — the Destination filter’s At supplier entry.
• Shipping & receiving — the receive flow this destination reuses.
• Inventory effects — what an ordinary TO does to inventory, for comparison.

Last updated: 1 September 2026