How to Set Up Linnworks: A Complete Beginner’s Guide

If you sell on more than one channel, whether that is Amazon and eBay, or Shopify plus a handful of marketplaces, keeping inventory, orders, and listings in sync manually becomes unmanageable fast. Linnworks exists to solve exactly this problem: one central system that connects your sales channels, warehouse, and shipping so that everything updates automatically instead of you reconciling spreadsheets at the end of every day.

The setup process has a lot of moving parts, and getting the order right matters. Connect a channel before your warehouse and SKUs are configured correctly, and you risk overselling or stock mismatches from day one. This guide walks through the entire setup process in the order it should actually be done, from creating your account to running your first synced order.

Table of Contents

1. Before You Start: What You Need Ready
2. Step 1: Create Your Linnworks Account
3. Step 2: Set Up Your Warehouse and Locations
4. Step 3: Add Your Products and SKUs
5. Step 4: Connect Your Sales Channels
6. Step 5: Set Up Inventory Sync and Location Mapping
7. Step 6: Configure Order Import Settings
8. Step 7: Set Up Shipping and Carrier Integration
9. Step 8: Test Before Going Live
10. Common Beginner Mistakes to Avoid

Before You Start: What You Need Ready

Setup goes faster if you gather these before logging in for the first time:

• A list of every sales channel you currently sell on (Amazon, eBay, Shopify, Walmart, TikTok Shop, etc.) along with login credentials or API access for each
• Your current product catalog with SKUs, ideally in a spreadsheet
• Accurate current stock counts for every SKU
• Your shipping carrier accounts (UPS, FedEx, Royal Mail, or whichever you use)
• Admin access to each sales channel account, since most integrations require store owner or admin permissions to authorize the connection

Step 1: Create Your Linnworks Account

Sign up for a Linnworks account through their website and select a plan based on your order volume and channel count. For new customers, Linnworks provides onboarding specialists who guide you through setup and go-live, so if you get stuck at any point, their support portal and onboarding team are there specifically for this stage.

Once your account is active, you will land on the main dashboard. Before touching channels or listings, the next two steps (warehouse and products) need to be in place first, since channels and inventory sync depend on them.

Step 2: Set Up Your Warehouse and Locations

Your warehouse setup defines where your stock physically lives and which locations are available to pull inventory from when fulfilling orders.

• Go to Inventory > Warehouse Management to create your primary warehouse location.
• If you operate from multiple physical locations, or split inventory between your own warehouse and a third-party logistics provider, set up each as a separate location now.
• Decide whether each location will be used to fulfill all channels or only specific ones. This matters later when you map locations to individual sales channels.

Why this comes before connecting channels: When you connect a sales channel later, Linnworks asks you to assign a warehouse to that channel.If your warehouse is not set up correctly first, stock will not push to the right place, or worse, it may not sync at all.

Step 3: Add Your Products and SKUs

Before connecting any sales channel, get your product catalog into Linnworks with accurate SKUs and stock levels.

• Add products manually for a small catalog, or import via a CSV/spreadsheet template for larger catalogs
• Every product needs a unique SKU. This SKU is the anchor that connects the same product across every channel, so consistency here is critical
• Enter your current stock quantity for each SKU accurately. Linnworks will use this as the starting point for syncing stock outward to your channels
• If you sell bundles or kits, you can set these up as composite items, but it is easier to get standalone products configured and synced correctly first before tackling bundles

The most common setup mistake happens here: the SKU in Linnworks must match the SKU on each sales channel exactly, character for character, including case.If a Shopify product variant has a blank SKU field, or an Amazon listing uses a slightly different SKU format, that specific item will not sync correctly even though everything else looks fine.

Step 4: Connect Your Sales Channels

With your warehouse and products in place, you are ready to connect your actual sales channels.

1. Go to Settings > Channel Integration.
2. Click Add New and select the channel you want to connect (Amazon, eBay, Shopify, Walmart, TikTok Shop, and many others are supported, with hundreds of direct integrations available).
3. Provide the required credentials. For most channels this means authorizing through an API connection or entering store login details, depending on the platform.
4. Complete the authentication step, which usually redirects you to the channel’s own login page to approve the connection securely.

Repeat this for every channel you sell on. You can add channels one at a time and test each before moving to the next, which is the safer approach if this is your first time setting up Linnworks.

Step 5: Set Up Inventory Sync and Location Mapping

Once a channel is connected, you need to tell Linnworks how stock should sync between your warehouse and that specific channel.

5. Go to Settings > Channel Integration and click Config next to the channel you just connected.
6. Enable Update Inventory from Location.
7. Click Location Mapping to open the mapping screen.
8. Tick the specific warehouse location(s) that should supply stock for this channel. By default, Linnworks shares the total available stock across all locations, but you can restrict this to specific locations if you only want certain warehouse stock counted for a particular channel.
9. Apply your changes.

If you have multiple warehouses, assign the correct one per channel carefully.Stock will only push from the location(s) you have ticked, so an unmapped or incorrectly mapped location means that channel will show zero or incorrect stock even if your actual inventory is fine.

Step 6: Configure Order Import Settings

This controls how orders flow from your connected channels into Linnworks for processing.

• Set rules for how frequently orders are imported from each channel
• Decide whether orders should be automatically assigned to a specific fulfillment workflow or require manual review first
• If you fulfill some orders yourself and send others to a third-party logistics provider or fulfillment center, set this distinction up now so orders route correctly from the start

This is also the stage where many sellers begin setting up automation rules, logic-based rules that route orders, assign shipping services, or flag exceptions automatically. For your first setup, keep rules simple and add complexity once you have a few weeks of real order data to work from.

Step 7: Set Up Shipping and Carrier Integration

Connect your shipping carriers so labels and tracking flow automatically once an order is ready to ship.

• Go to Shipping > Integration and add your carrier accounts (UPS, FedEx, Royal Mail, USPS, or others depending on your region)
• Map each channel’s shipping service options to the corresponding Linnworks shipping service, so that when a customer selects expedited shipping on your Shopify store, for example, Linnworks knows which carrier service to use
• If you use a shipping management tool like ShipStation alongside Linnworks, this is also where you would set up that integration, allowing Linnworks orders to flow into ShipStation for label printing and carrier selection

Step 8: Test Before Going Live

Do not connect every channel and immediately let live customer orders flow through untested.

• Import a small number of sample or recent orders and confirm they appear correctly in Linnworks with the right SKUs, quantities, and shipping details
• Manually check that a stock change in Linnworks (for example, reducing quantity by one) actually reflects on the connected channel within a few minutes
• Process one real order start to finish: confirm the order imports, the stock updates, the shipping label generates correctly, and the tracking number syncs back to the original channel
• Only after this test cycle works cleanly should you treat the integration as fully live for that channel

Common Beginner Mistakes to Avoid

• Connecting channels before the warehouse and SKUs are set up. This is the single most common setup mistake and the reason most stock sync issues happen in the first week.
• Mismatched SKUs between Linnworks and a sales channel. Even a single character difference, or a blank SKU field on the channel side, breaks the sync for that item silently.
• Not mapping warehouse locations per channel. Without this step, Linnworks may share total stock across all locations when you actually wanted to restrict a channel to a specific warehouse.
• Building complex automation rules too early. Start with the basics working reliably before layering in advanced logic-based rules. It is much easier to debug a simple setup than a complex one.
• Skipping the test phase. Going live across every channel at once without testing means any configuration mistake affects real customer orders immediately instead of being caught in a controlled test.