Key Concepts & Glossary

These are the terms you'll see throughout Orca. Each is explained in plain language — no technical background needed.

Location

Any place where you hold inventory: a warehouse, a retail store, or a partner facility. Orca works with the locations you've already set up in Shopify. You choose which locations Orca is allowed to route orders to — a location can hold stock without being used for fulfillment.

Fulfillment order

Shopify's term for the work order behind a customer order: the instruction telling a specific location which items to prepare and ship. A single customer order can produce one fulfillment order or several, since Orca considers every item on its own rather than treating the order as one block. Anything the customer already has in hand needs no routing; anything still owed to the customer is assigned to the best location to fulfill it.

Routing rules

The instructions that tell Orca how to choose a fulfillment location — for example, "prefer the location closest to the customer" or "never fulfill online orders from the outlet store." You define the rules; Orca applies them automatically to every incoming order.

Consolidation

A routing strategy where Orca keeps the whole order together and ships it from a single location. If no location has every item, Orca can move stock to one location first (see inventory transfer) so the order still ships as one package.

Split fulfillment

The opposite strategy: the order ships in parts from more than one location — for example, two items from the warehouse and one from a store. Splitting gets items to the customer faster when stock is scattered, at the cost of multiple shipments.

Inventory transfer

A movement of stock between your locations. In Orca you'll see three kinds: order transfers, which Orca creates to bring stock together for a specific customer order; inventory transfers, which you create yourself to rebalance stock between locations; and purchase orders, incoming stock from a supplier.

Fulfillment hold

A pause Orca places on an order that can't ship yet — typically while a transfer is on its way to the fulfilling location. The hold is released automatically once the stock arrives, and the order continues on its way.

Net available inventory

The stock Orca actually counts on at each location — what's physically on hand, minus anything damaged, reserved, held for quality control, or already promised to other orders and pending transfers. This is how Orca avoids overselling: if two orders both want the last unit at a store, the first order claims it and the second is routed elsewhere.