Summary: We present the problem of shipping a single-product from a single supply origin, through storage depots, to a single demand destination by trucks, ships, etc. and aim to minimize the sum of ordering, inventory and transportation costs over an infinite time horizon. We formulate the problem consisting of power-of-two, stationary and nested replenishment policies for the multistage inventory-distribution system. We then present the cost structure analysis for this serially distributed storage depot problem and develop a heuristic method to obtain satisfactory results. On average, the average cost deviations between our proposed heuristic and LINGO software are within 1.2%.