Incoming orders

Two common problems start in the minutes after a customer pays, when the order exists in the store and nowhere else. One is the second sale of the last unit; the other is the order that sits unnoticed until someone exports the day's orders by hand. Both go away when the order reaches your account at payment and the unit is reserved at the same moment.

Arrival and reservation

When a customer pays on your store, the order reaches your account within seconds. The unit is reserved at that moment, so the same jacket cannot be sold again on another channel while it waits to be packed, and the order appears at the top of your list ready to pick, with nothing typed by anyone. If you sell from several stores or into several countries, the orders all land in the same list. Your packers work one queue, a channel column says which store each order came from, and a filter narrows the view to one store when someone needs it.

A marketplace sale and a web sale can only claim the same unit if there is a gap between the sale and the reservation. Here the reservation happens at payment, so the two sales cannot overlap.

Four stock figures

Stock is shown per product and per location as four plain figures: available, committed, unavailable and on hand. The storefront, the warehouse and your accountant read the same four, so any drift shows up as a visible difference before it turns into an oversold order.

A reservation at the moment of payment is worth more than any report you run the next morning.

Cancellations and refunds

Cancel an order in your store and that is enough. The reserved units go back to available on their own, without a second action in a second system. A refund works the same way, with the distinction that matters to your stock: a refund flagged as restock puts the returned units back into sellable stock, a refund with no restock records the money only, and a refund issued before anything shipped releases the reservation. The store carries the restock flag, so nothing has to be re-entered in your account.

The label

The carrier is chosen when the label is created from the queue. The rate is selected under a rule you set and your team supervises, on observed performance and the cost of the moment, and on every label you can see which rate won and why. The fulfilment status and the tracking number flow back to the store under your own name, so your customer's order page updates without anyone pasting a number into it.

What the label costs depends on whose rate it carries. On your own contracts, it is the rate you negotiated, and the label counts against your plan allowance. On our rates in France and the United Kingdom, it is the exact carrier price with zero markup, as a line you can read in your account. Past the allowance nothing breaks: extra labels are billed per unit, and if overage becomes a normal month, the next plan up is usually cheaper. Billing for shipping walks through the invoice.

The first morning

Past orders come across with the connection, so your account does not start as a blank list. Someone on customer service can pull up an order shipped before the switch next to one shipped after, and the four stock figures are already populated from the store. The few days that follow go on agreeing how you ship, lane by lane, which is covered in Connecting your store.