Stock

Inventory states

Stock in the sidebar lists every variant with three figures.

Number	What it is
On hand	What is physically in the building. It moves when goods arrive, when goods are dispatched and when a stock count is recorded.
Promised	Sold and not yet dispatched. Spoken for, and still on the shelf.
Available	On hand minus promised. This is the number sent to your channels.

A sale does not reduce on hand, because the goods are still there. Selling one of fifty makes it 50 on hand, 1 promised, 49 available. On hand becomes 49 when the parcel goes, and promised drops back to 0 at the same moment.

An order reserves stock only after allocation. Until then, the order is visible but the physical, reserved and available quantities remain unchanged.

Correcting a count

1. Find the variant on the Stock screen, or open its product.
2. Press Adjust.
3. Say what you are doing: counting what is there, which sets the number, or adding or removing, which changes it by an amount and takes a minus sign.
4. Give a reason: correction, stocktake, delivery arrived, customer return, or fixing a mistake.
5. Add a note if there is anything to say. Whoever reads it in three months will be grateful.
6. Save. The new figures are confirmed on screen.

Adjusting changes on hand only. Promised is moved by orders and dispatches and is never typed in, so a correction here cannot take back something already sold.

Inventory history

Why? beside a variant opens every movement, newest first: when, what changed, what was left, the reason and who did it. The last line is the number on the screen. Automatic movements - an allocation, a dispatch, a return - say so rather than naming a person.

Warehouses and bins

Stock lives in a warehouse. Settings › Warehouses holds them, each with a short code that is printed on picking lists and cannot be changed afterwards, a name, a telephone number a carrier can ring, and an address.

A warehouse needs a street and a postcode before a marketplace or a carrier will accept it as somewhere to ship from. One warehouse is the default, which is where an import counts stock in and what a new product uses.

Inside a warehouse are locations: an aisle, a bay, a shelf, in whatever words the building already uses. A pick list is ordered by them, so the walk is short and the same every time.

Warehouses are archived rather than deleted, and the default one cannot be archived. Stock, address details and movement history are retained; Bring it back restores the warehouse while preserving the ledger.

What a store calls your warehouses

Every shop has its own name for the place stock is kept. Shopify calls them locations, Magento calls them inventory sources, eBay calls them merchant locations - so the same building is a different word on each, and one code here could never satisfy them all. The Stock tab on a connection is where they are matched up, one row per warehouse.

Where the store answers, the field is a list of that store’s own locations and you pick one. Where it cannot be asked - a store having an afternoon, a credential that expired - it is a plain box and you type the name.

A store with one location needs no decision: stock goes to it whatever is set. A store with several has to be told, and until it is, a stock push is refused rather than sent to whichever came first - publishing one building’s count against another reads as correct and is not. The screen says so on the row rather than leaving it to a failed run.

Leaving a row empty means two different things, and the line under each one says which. For the warehouse the store sells from it sends the warehouse’s own code. For every other warehouse it means this shop is not told about that building at all - which is how “do not tell eBay about the returns room” is said.

The match is on the location’s name and ignores capitals, so renaming a location in the store works just as well as changing it here.

Which warehouse a store sells from

With more than one warehouse, the Stock tab on a connection opens with Sells from. It is your default warehouse until you choose another, and the choice decides three things together:

• The stock the store is told. A store that keeps one stock figure per listing - eBay, WooCommerce, most marketplaces - is told this warehouse’s available quantity and no other. The total across warehouses is never sent, because an order is picked from one building.
• Where its orders are picked. New orders from the store are promised from this warehouse. Orders already imported stay where they were.
• Where its listings ship from. The address a listing carries is this warehouse’s.

Changing it sends the store its stock again from the new warehouse on the next inventory run. This is how a warehouse kept for one marketplace - clearance stock on eBay, say - sells there and nowhere else.

On eBay every warehouse with a street and a postcode has a location of its own. They are made when you press Set up on the connection’s Listing settings, and a missing one is made the first time a listing is published from that warehouse. Ships from in Listing settings still wins when you choose a location there by hand.

Channel inventory rules

By default a channel is told exactly what is available. The Stock tab on a connection changes that, without changing your stock or what any other channel is told.

Each rule is a when and a send:

When	Send
everything, or the SKU starts with, ends with or contains something, or the product is tagged	a share of it - one in two, one in three; all but a number, which is how a buffer is held back; at most a number, which caps what a channel is told; or always send a fixed number.

Rules are read top to bottom: the first that matches decides the number and the rest are not consulted, so put the narrow ones above the general ones. Use the arrows to reorder.

Preview and compare

On the connection's Import and sync tab:

• Preview stock works out exactly what would be sent, with the rules applied, and shows it without sending an update.
• Compare with the store asks the shop what it is currently advertising and lists every SKU where the two disagree without changing either system.
• Send stock pushes. The button carries a count of how many SKUs are waiting.

Every push is recorded with what was sent and what the channel answered, so a disagreement has evidence rather than opinions.

Channel reconciliation

A scheduled reconciliation compares each channel's advertised quantity with the expected value and corrects temporary drift. Corrections appear in the job report as "store was out of step".