The returns location
What it is
A site can nominate one of its locations as the place returned goods land. When a return is restocked and nobody picks a destination, the goods post here.
Its stock is not for sale until it moves
The flag that decides whether stock can be sold is pickable, not the returns flag. Where a site's returns location is not pickable — the usual arrangement — its stock is on-hand but sits outside Available, and no pick will ever draw from it. A returned unit has to be moved to a pickable location before it can sell again.
That is deliberate. Returned goods have not necessarily been looked at, and a returns location that fed straight back into picking would put them on sale as A-grade stock without anyone checking them first.
Where a site's returns location is pickable, the opposite holds: restocked goods are available and pickable the moment they land, and no second step is needed. Check which arrangement your site uses before assuming either — see make returned stock sellable.
Which bucket its stock shows in
A returns location set up as a quarantine location with picking turned off — the usual arrangement — reports its stock under Quarantine, which reads correctly on the breakdown: goods held pending a look.
One to watch: a returns location left as a standard location with picking turned off reports under Other instead, because Other is the catch-all for a sellable-type location that has been held back. The stock is held either way, but Quarantine says why and Other does not.
Either way it counts in on-hand. See stock quantities for the full set of buckets.
It is kept out of the published location codes
Alongside the availability figure, Yessort publishes a variant's location codes to a sales channel so a shopper — or someone answering the phone — can be told where the goods sit. A returns location that is not pickable is left out of that list, for the same reason its stock sits outside Available: pointing anyone at ungraded returns offers stock that cannot be sold.
The rule is pickable locations only, so it needs no returns-specific setting. Turn picking off and the location drops out of the published codes along with quarantine, damaged and staging locations. Leave picking on — the arrangement described above, where restocked goods are sellable the moment they land — and it is published like any other pick face, correctly.
Where a variant's only stock at a site is sitting in returns, it publishes no codes at all and Yessort clears the field on the channel, rather than advertising the returns location by default. See held-back stock.
The store's figure follows within the hour
Availability is recalculated and pushed to a sales channel both when stock changes and on a schedule. So a returned unit that is not sellable comes off the store's number on the next pass rather than the instant it lands. See keeping stock in step.
Home locations never sweep it
Setting a variant's home location relocates that variant's stock at the site into the home. Stock in the returns location is left where it is unless you explicitly include it — for the same reason as above, so ungraded returns are never swept into a pick face and quietly sold.
A site with no returns location
Plenty of sites do not need one. A shop with a single location has nowhere else to put a return, so restocking into that location is the right answer and a separate returns location would add a step for nothing. Warehouses are the case that benefits, because there a return genuinely needs holding apart from the pick faces until somebody checks it.
Where a site has none, what happens depends on where the return came from.
- A refund raised in the sales channel has nobody to ask. Yessort restocks into the site's default location and carries on. The goods are never lost.
- A return processed in Yessort stops and asks you to choose a location before the restock goes through.
A Set a returns location notice appears against the site only where it has more than one location — only, that is, where the goods could have gone somewhere else. A single-location site never raises it: the fallback already put them in the only place they could go, so there is nothing to change.
A returns location cannot currently be set in Yessort. Where one exists it shows as a badge on the location's detail and appears in a locations export, but there is no field for setting it. So on the sites that can raise the notice, take it as a prompt to move the goods on rather than one you can settle from the locations screen.