Can I use my existing shop stock for an online store?

Yes, and you should — but not all of it. Hold back a reserve for the counter and publish only the remainder online, because a website that sells a unit already promised to a walk-in customer creates a cancellation instead of a sale. One stock figure, minus a channel reserve, is the arrangement that survives a busy Saturday.

Should online prices match my shop prices?

They should be a deliberate decision, not an accident. Consumer prices are normally quoted tax-inclusive because that is the number a shopper expects to pay, while trade prices are quoted before tax. If you also supply retailers, publishing your trade price online undercuts the very shops that buy from you — which is why separate price lists per channel matter more than a single price.

What happens when an online order cannot be filled completely?

The honest handling is a split delivery: ship what you have, raise a backorder for the rest, tell the customer both things, and do not charge delivery twice. Silently cancelling the missing line turns a manageable delay into a complaint and a refund.

Do I need a separate system for the online store?

No — and a separate system is usually what causes the problems people blame on ecommerce. The storefront is a third way to capture an order, alongside the counter and the trade desk. What it needs is its own price list, its own delivery options and a fulfilment queue; what it must not have is its own product list or its own stock number.

What changes in the warehouse when you start selling online?

Counter sales hand the goods over immediately; online orders create an obligation that has to be picked, packed, handed to a courier and tracked. That is a genuinely new process — a pick list, a packing step, a tracking number, and a queue someone owns. Businesses usually underestimate this part and overestimate the website.

How Do You Sell Online Without Breaking Your Shop's Stock?

The website is the easy part. The hard part is that you now have two ways to sell the same unit, and only one of it. Every painful ecommerce launch in a business that already had a shop traces back to that sentence. This article is about the three things that actually decide whether selling online strengthens the business or just generates cancellations: the stock number, the price, and the warehouse.

The stock number is the whole problem

A shop with a counter has one truth: what is on the shelf. Add a website and there are two claims on it, arriving in any order, sometimes seconds apart.

If the website keeps its own product list — as it does with most quick storefront setups — the two numbers drift within a day. The customer buys online, the picker cannot find the item, and you send an apology instead of a parcel.

Two arrangements survive:

One stock pool with a channel reserve. There is a single figure. The storefront may only sell what remains after a reserve is held back for the counter and the trade desk. So thirty units on the shelf with a reserve of five means the website advertises twenty-five. The counter never runs out because of a web order.

Reservation at checkout. The moment an order is placed, those units stop being available to anyone else — not when the picker gets to them an hour later.

Both are unglamorous, and both are why an ecommerce project should start in the stock system rather than in the design.

Two audiences, two prices

Consumer and trade buyers should not see the same number, and the reasons are practical rather than cynical.

Consumers expect a price that includes tax, because that is what they will pay at checkout. Trade buyers expect a price before tax, because they reclaim it. Showing a shopper an ex-tax price produces one thing: an abandoned basket at the moment the total jumps.

The larger issue applies to anyone who supplies other shops. Publishing your trade price on a public website undercuts your own dealers. They can see it, their customers can see it, and you have quietly become a competitor to the businesses that buy from you.

The mechanism that solves this is a price list per channel over one catalogue: retail online, wholesale for shops, distributor pricing for volume accounts. Same product record, different price. Not three product lists.

Free delivery is a pricing decision

A free-delivery threshold is not a marketing flourish; it changes basket size and it comes out of your margin. Decide it deliberately: what does shipping actually cost you, and what is the basket value at which absorbing it pays for itself. Then say it plainly in the header, because the shopper is doing that arithmetic whether you show it or not.

The same applies to cash on delivery, if you offer it. It carries a real handling cost, riders do not carry large change, and it has a higher return rate than prepaid orders. A cap on order value plus a small handling charge is normal and honest — as long as it is visible before checkout, not after.

The warehouse is where the work moved

This is the part businesses underestimate.

A counter sale ends when the customer walks out. An online order creates an obligation: pick it, pack it, hand it to a courier, and be able to answer "where is it?" for the next four days. That is a new process, not a new page.

What it needs:

A pick list and someone whose job is to clear it.
A record of what was actually picked, not what was ordered — the two differ, and the difference is the point.
A backorder when the pick is short, linked to the inbound purchase order it waits on. Split the delivery, tell the customer, and do not charge delivery twice.
A tracking number captured at dispatch and shown to the customer without them having to ask.
Serial numbers on anything valuable enough to carry a warranty, recorded at dispatch — that is what lets you honour a claim later without demanding a receipt.

If your prospective setup has no screen where a person can see everything owed and not yet shipped, that queue exists anyway. It is just living in someone's head.

Returns are part of selling online

Distance selling has a return rate that counter sales do not. Plan for it as a normal cost rather than an exception.

The workable version mirrors the counter rule: a return is always against an order line. The customer picks which items from which order, gives a reason from a fixed list — so patterns become reportable — and the refund goes back to the tender they paid with. Grade the goods on arrival: resalable stock goes back on the shelf, damaged goes to a separate location. Skipping that grading step is how damaged units get resold and a second complaint is created.

A sensible order of work

Get one catalogue and one stock number across every channel you already have.
Add price lists so retail and trade are separate.
Build the fulfilment queue — pick, pack, dispatch, backorder.
Then build the storefront.

Most failed launches run this list backwards, starting with the design and discovering the stock problem in week two of trading.

Something you can click

We have published a demonstration where a consumer storefront, a point-of-sale till and a B2B trade desk all sit on one catalogue and one stock pool — including the channel reserve, the retail price list, split deliveries with backorders, and the pick-pack-dispatch queue described above.

It is a design preview on fabricated sample data, not a deployed installation, and it is labelled that way throughout. Opening it is a quicker way to see how the three channels fit together than any diagram.