Stock

Stock is the value that changes most often and whose errors cost the most. A wrong description annoys nobody. An article that still looks available in the shop but is no longer on the shelf costs an order, an apology and, in case of doubt, the customer.

That is why TRADElube treats stock differently from the rest of the product data, and that difference is what this page is about.

Stock hangs on the product and on the store

A stock figure is not a number on the product but a number per store. On the product you find it in the Stocks and Shipping section, as one line per store.

Stocks and Shipping section with two stores, shipping cost and delivery time

Two things follow from that, and both are regularly overlooked:

Variants carry their own stock. A variant is a full product (see data model), and the parent article has no stock figure that would apply to the family. Twelve tins of white and no tin of black are two numbers, not one.
The number can come from either direction. Usually the system that actually moves the goods delivers the stock to TRADElube, and TRADElube carries it into the connected shops and marketplaces. There are tasks for both directions. Which ones a system offers is listed under Channels and tasks.

Why stock gets a task of its own

There is a task of its own for stock, Stocks Upload for instance, separate from the product upload. That looks like unnecessary work and is the reason stock figures can be up to date at all.

Behind it lies a difference in size. A stock transfer writes one number per article, a product upload the whole record, with texts, prices, properties, categories and images. It decides how often a task can run at all.

That is exactly what TRADElube models: the Performance field of a task only offers the intervals its action can bear. A stock task can be set down to 30 seconds, a product upload cannot. There it stops at ten minutes. So you cannot accidentally schedule a full product reconciliation every minute, and you do not have to slow stock down to the pace of the product data.

Then there is the effect when something goes wrong. Two tasks run separately: if the product upload gets stuck on a faulty record, stock keeps going. Were stock part of the product upload, the most important number would stand still until the least important error is fixed.

Several stores

You create stores under Settings, via the button Stores, with a position and a name. A store needs no more than that, because it is a distinction and not an address.

Creating a store changes every article at once: every product gets a stock line for it automatically, with the value 0, without you touching any of them. The lines disappear again in the same way when the store is deleted.

As long as you keep only one store, you do not need this section. The single line on the product is then the stock figure, and the transfer plan has nothing to tell apart.

What arrives in the connected system is decided by the transfer plan: it holds which store is transferred. That is also why a second store does not show up somewhere by itself. Most online shops know exactly one stock figure per article, and only the configuration can know which one that should be.

A Saturday in the shop

Suppose you sell a varnish both over the counter and online, and you keep two stores for it, Dispatch store and Branch. Only what lies in the dispatch store should be orderable online. Four settings determine that:

What you set	Your choice
Stores under Settings	Dispatch store, Branch
Transfer plan of the Stocks Upload task	Dispatch store
Performance of the stock task	30 seconds
Performance of the product upload	Nightly

On Saturday morning four tins go out through the shop, and your ERP system reports the new figure to TRADElube. Half a minute later it is in the shop. The tins in the branch are untouched by it, because the transfer plan does not carry them at all.

Were the stock figures riding along in the product upload, the old number would stand in the shop until the following night. On a busy Saturday that is ten hours in which you sell goods that are no longer there.

The price of this split is small and worth naming: it is two tasks instead of one, so two schedules, two transfer plans, and when something goes wrong, two places to look.

Delivery times say something different from stock

A delivery time answers the question how long it takes, a stock figure the question how much is there. The two sit in the same section and are still readily confused.

You create delivery times under Settings, via the button Delivery Times. Each carries a name, a unit and a range made of Min. Duration and Max. Duration.

Delivery times in the settings with name, unit and range

What matters here is the range. An online shop displays "delivery time 3 to 5 days", because nobody can guarantee a single day and one value would be either too optimistic or too cautious. TRADElube therefore holds both values rather than one.

On the product you select one of the delivery times you created. On a newly created product that often happens by itself: if the chosen shipping method carries a default delivery time, it is taken over as long as the field is still empty. On an existing product that does not happen, so that a change of shipping method does not overwrite a delivery time you have already maintained.

How it fits together

The transfer plan of the stock task holds which store goes into which field of the target system.
The renewal time on the task decides, alongside that, when a record is transferred again even though nothing has changed. With stock that is the seatbelt against a discrepancy nobody noticed.
If a stock figure in the shop differs, the traces show per record which value was transferred and when.
The channel mapping is the precondition for a stock figure meeting the right article in the target system.