Retailers who sell in more than one place end up with more than one stock count. The online store has one. The point of sale has one. The warehouse or the back room has a spreadsheet, or a count in the accounting system, or a person who just knows. Each gets updated on its own schedule, and the gaps between them are where the trouble happens: the order that cannot be fulfilled, the product marked out of stock while it sits on a shelf, the reorder placed for something the warehouse already had.
Why the counts drift
- Sales are recorded in different systems. An online order reduces the web count. A shop sale reduces the POS count. Neither tells the other.
- Deliveries get entered once, somewhere. A delivery arrives and is entered into whichever system the person on that day uses. The others find out at the next stocktake.
- Returns, damage and transfers go unrecorded. Stock moves between stores, gets written off or comes back from a customer, and the paperwork lags or never happens.
- The stocktake is the only reconciliation. Every few months the counts are forced to agree by hand, and then they start drifting again.
Containing it
The platforms involved usually have some way to connect. Many e-commerce and POS products can sync stock with each other, and if that is available it is worth switching on. A daily export from each system into a comparison sheet will at least show where the drift is largest. A rule that every delivery is entered in one named system, by whoever receives it, removes one source of error. These help a single store with a simple range.
They stop helping once there are several stores, a warehouse, suppliers with their own lead times, and reorder decisions that depend on knowing the real position today.
One inventory behind every channel
Retailers who have solved this keep stock in one system and have every channel read from it. The online store, the POS and the warehouse are all views of the same count. A sale anywhere reduces it everywhere. Deliveries, transfers, returns and write-offs are recorded once. Reorder points are set against the real position and generate purchase orders when they are crossed. Because the stock system knows the suppliers and the sales, it can show what is selling, what is slow and what will run out before the next delivery.
This does not mean replacing the online store or the POS. Established e-commerce platforms and payment gateways do their job well, and we integrate with them through their APIs rather than rebuilding them. The custom piece is the inventory and supplier system behind the shopfront, connected to the store, the POS and the accounts so the count is right in all of them.
If your stock lives in three places, have a look at what we build for retail and e-commerce, or tell us how an order flows through your business.
