Deliver to another supplier

Elevate plan

A purchase order normally arrives at one of your own locations. It can instead be delivered to another supplier, who receives the goods and holds them for you: you buy from Supplier A, Supplier B takes delivery, and the stock is yours from the moment you receive it — it just sits at B until you call it in.

Use it for contract manufacturing, finishing, kitting, or pre-positioning — anywhere a second company handles your goods before they ever reach a warehouse of yours.

What makes a PO a deliver-to-supplier PO
Creating one
The receiving supplier and its delivery address
Line items are always held at the supplier
Where these POs show up
Sending
Receiving at the supplier
Reversing a receipt
Getting the stock into a warehouse
What this does to your inventory numbers
Documents and exports
Merging, splitting, and returns
Limits

What makes a PO a deliver-to-supplier PO

Every purchase order has a destination. There are three kinds:

Destination	Where the goods go	Whose stock it becomes
One of your locations	Your warehouse or store	Yours, counted in Shopify at that location
Dropship	Your customer’s address	Never yours — see Dropship POs
Deliver to a supplier	A second supplier’s address	Yours, held at that supplier until you release it into a location

You pick between them on the same destination picker you’d use to choose a location. Deliver to a supplier (held as your stock) appears there as a pinned entry alongside your real locations, with Another supplier receives and holds the goods for you underneath it.

Creating one

Open Supply Orders → Purchase Orders → Create Purchase Order → Create Empty PO, pick the supplier you’re buying from, then choose Deliver to a supplier (held as your stock) as the destination. A Receiving supplier block appears right below the picker — choose the supplier that will take delivery.

You can also switch an existing order onto this destination while it’s still Draft: open the PO, edit its header, and pick the same entry. The receiving supplier block appears there too.

Those two places are the only ones. The replenishment flows (Create from Forecast, Create from Min/Max, Create from Sales History), the customer-orders wizard, the CSV/XLSX and Stocky imports, and bulk actions from the Forecast page all keep the ordinary location-or-dropship picker — a deliver-to-supplier order started anywhere else is refused with a message pointing you back to the purchase orders list.

Copying or splitting a deliver-to-supplier PO into a new order carries the destination, the receiving supplier, and the delivery address across, so the copy behaves like the original.

The receiving supplier and its delivery address

The Receiving supplier picker lists your suppliers, and the one you’re buying from stays in the list — buying from a supplier and having that same supplier hold the goods is a supported setup. Two entries are never selectable: the placeholder default-supplier row, and suppliers you’ve deleted.

When you pick a receiving supplier, its address is copied onto the purchase order as the delivery address. From then on it belongs to the order — edit it on the PO if this shipment goes somewhere other than the supplier’s main address, and it stays as you left it.

If the receiving supplier has no address on file, the dialog warns you up front, and the order’s destination panel shows No supplier delivery address with an Add the receiving supplier’s delivery address so this order can be sent prompt. The panel itself is headed Deliver to supplier rather than Delivery Location, and it names the receiving supplier with an At supplier badge.

Line items are always held at the supplier

On an ordinary PO each line carries a fulfillment mode — deliver to warehouse, hold at supplier, or warehouse consignment. On a deliver-to-supplier PO every line is Held at supplier, and the per-line control is locked with the explanation “This order is delivered to a supplier, so every line is held at that supplier.”

That’s the whole point of the destination: there is no warehouse on this order for a line to be delivered to, and consignment would mean the goods aren’t yours — which they are.

Where these POs show up

PO list — an At supplier badge sits next to the order, and the Destination filter gains a pinned At supplier entry. Deliver-to-supplier orders have no location of their own, so that entry is the only way to filter them in. It stays available on every plan, so a shop that moves off Elevate can still find the orders it has.
Detail page — the destination panel names the receiving supplier and the delivery address instead of a location, and the per-location inventory columns read n/a rather than blank, since there’s no location to read stock at.
Reporting and the supply-orders dashboard — wherever purchase orders are grouped by location, these orders get their own At supplier group, separate from dropship orders and from orders that simply have no location assigned yet.
The receiving supplier’s page — once received, the stock appears under Suppliers → the receiving supplier → Variants → My stock at supplier, because that’s where it physically is. Each row links back to the purchase order that brought it in, which belongs to the supplier you bought from — that’s the provenance of the goods, not a mistake. A supplier that has never sold you anything can hold stock this way.

Sending

Send to Supplier needs both halves of the destination before it will run:

No receiving supplier yet → Choose the supplier that receives and holds the goods before sending.
No delivery address yet → Add the receiving supplier’s delivery address before sending.

Both appear as tasks in the order’s destination panel, so you can fix them without hunting. The order goes to the supplier you’re buying from, as always — the receiving supplier isn’t emailed and doesn’t get a login.

Receiving at the supplier

The goods really do become yours on receipt, so the wording stays “receive” — it just says where:

Receive Quantities reads Receive at Supplier, and confirming reads Confirm Receiving at Supplier. The dialog explains that received quantities are recorded as your stock at the receiving supplier, not in Shopify.
Quick Complete receives every outstanding confirmed quantity and completes the order, with a Stock is recorded at the receiving supplier note explaining that the quantities are yours and a supplier stock release is what moves them into a location.
The status stepper’s receive step reads Received at supplier — “All items have been received and are held at the receiving supplier.”

Partial receipts, several passes, over- and under-receiving all work exactly as they do on any other order.

Sync to Shopify is switched off for these orders, with the reason shown on the disabled action: “Stock is held at the receiving supplier — move it into a location with a Supplier Stock Release.” Nothing is missing — the stock is recorded, it just isn’t in Shopify yet, because it isn’t in a Shopify location yet.

Reversing a receipt

Unreceive works normally, and the dialog says what it’s reversing: the quantities are your stock at the receiving supplier, not Shopify inventory, and reversing removes them from that position.

The one thing that can’t be undone is quantity that has already moved on — units reserved or released by a supplier stock release are refused, with a message saying so. Release-free quantities reverse cleanly.

Getting the stock into a warehouse

A received deliver-to-supplier PO leaves you holding buyer-owned stock at the receiving supplier. To bring it into one of your locations — and into Shopify’s on-hand — raise a Supplier Stock Release against the supplier that holds it, not against the one you bought from. That’s the step that turns this stock into Shopify inventory, and the only one that does.

What this does to your inventory numbers

Shopify on-hand and incoming never change from this order, at any status, through any action. The stock reaches Shopify only when a supplier stock release lands it in a location.
Your forecast counts the units as on order. They’re yours from receipt, so an open deliver-to-supplier PO suppresses a repeat reorder for the same shortfall, exactly like an ordinary “hold at supplier” line — and unlike a dropship order, whose goods never become your stock at all.
Per-location figures are untouched. There’s no location on the order, so location-filtered forecasts, per-location min/max thresholds, and incoming reconciliation all skip it.
Custom items can’t be converted into real Shopify products on these orders — that step activates Shopify inventory at a warehouse location, which this destination deliberately never does.

Documents and exports

The supplier-facing PDF ships to the receiving supplier’s address, and its Ship To block gains one line — Deliver to: <receiving supplier>, receiving on our behalf — so the supplier you’re buying from can tell at a glance that the address belongs to another business receiving for you, not to one of your own warehouses.

Bulk CSV/XLSX exports need nothing special: the eight Delivery columns (company name, two address lines, city, province, ZIP, country, phone) carry the receiving supplier’s address on these orders, the customer’s on a dropship order, and the location’s on an ordinary one. Add them from a purchase-order or line-item export template like any other column.

Merging, splitting, and returns

Merging — a deliver-to-supplier PO can’t be merged with another order, in either direction: merging would change who holds the goods.
Moving lines to an existing PO — also blocked, for the same reason. Each order is held by a single supplier, so lines can’t cross between them. Splitting into a new order is fine — the copy carries the destination, the receiving supplier, and the address.
Returns (RMAs) — a return raised from a deliver-to-supplier PO uses that order’s delivery address as the return origin, since the receiving supplier is where the goods are physically coming back from.

Limits

Elevate plan required to create one or to switch an order onto this destination.
Only Create Empty PO and editing a Draft order offer it — replenishment flows, the customer-orders wizard, imports, and bulk actions don’t.
The destination and the receiving supplier are Draft-only, and locked once the order is sent.
Every line is held at the receiving supplier — the per-line fulfillment mode can’t be changed.
The whole order goes to one receiving supplier. Splitting some lines to a warehouse and others to a supplier on one order isn’t supported — use separate orders.
No Shopify sync, no bulk auto-receive, no POS receiving, and no custom-item conversion.