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Locations

Locations is the geographic backbone of the account. Every customer address, every delivery price rule, every shipping zone and every "which city do you sell in" question resolves against the country, city and area records kept here. OSOSS ships a reference database of the world's locations but installs nothing by default, so this is one of the first pages to visit on a new account: until a country is installed, address forms have nothing to offer.

Menu path: Settings > Locations

URL: https://my.ososs.com/dashboard/general-settings/locations

Screenshot from the live OSOSS Dashboard

How locations work in OSOSS

Locations is a menu with four pages, each with its own permission, so a role can be allowed to maintain areas without being allowed to install countries:

PageHoldsBelongs to
CountriesThe countries you operate in-
CitiesCities and governoratesA country
AreasNeighbourhoods and districtsA city
ZonesNamed groups of locations used for pricing and routingAny mix of the above

The first three are a strict hierarchy: a city belongs to one country, an area belongs to one city. That is why address forms across the dashboard, the POS, the store and the mobile app cascade - choose the country, then the city becomes selectable, then the area.

Every record carries an Active flag you can toggle directly in the list. This is the control that matters day to day. Deactivating a city removes it from every address dropdown and from delivery pricing without deleting it, so historical orders that used it still read correctly. Deleting, by contrast, is refused for anything already referenced.

Zones sit apart from the hierarchy. A zone is a name plus a selection of countries, cities and areas, created from a drawer, and it exists so that pricing and routing can talk about "Greater Kuwait" or "Northern Governorates" instead of listing twenty areas every time.

Install the locations you serve

  1. Open Countries and click Install.
  2. Select the countries you operate in. This is a multi-select, so add every country you sell or ship to now.
  3. Leave Install cities and Install areas switched on unless you intend to type your own. With them on, OSOSS brings the whole tree in one operation; with them off you get an empty country and a lot of manual work.
  4. Confirm. The countries appear in the list, with their cities and areas populated underneath.
  5. Go through Cities and Areas and switch Active off for anywhere you do not actually serve.
  6. Create the Zones you need, then use them when writing delivery prices.

Getting the names right

The names come from a reference database and are not always the names your customers use. An area labelled by its official district name when everyone in the city calls it something else produces the same failure every time: the customer picks the closest-looking option, the driver arrives at the wrong neighbourhood, and the order is re-delivered at your cost. Edit the area names to match local usage before you go live, in both languages.

Tip: Trim aggressively. A checkout dropdown with four hundred areas is worse for conversion than one with the twenty you actually deliver to, and the Active toggle makes trimming reversible.
Note: Install countries before filling in Company Profile. The country, city and area selectors on the company address read this list, and they stay empty until something is installed.
Warning: Deactivating a country cascades in effect: its cities and areas stop being offered too, and any delivery rule or zone built on them stops matching. Check your rules before switching a country off.

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