Why you would send a shop less stock than you have

Stock is not sold in one shop alone. The same product can go out through a web shop, a marketplace, over the phone and across the counter, and the figures do not refresh across channels in the same second. On the last few pieces that becomes a problem: the same piece is sold twice and one of the orders has to be cancelled.

Safety stock is meant for exactly that. You mark part of the stock as a reserve the web shop does not see, and that covers the lag between channels.

How it is calculated

You enter the safety stock on the product. When MetaKocka sends the figure to the web shop, it subtracts that value from free stock and sends the difference.

Nothing changes inside MetaKocka. Stock and free stock stay exactly as they are, and safety stock only affects the figure that goes to the shop.

It is switched on per shop

Taking safety stock into account is a setting on the individual web shop or marketplace, not a single global switch. You can hold a reserve where the stock sells fastest and send the full figure everywhere else. With one shop you switch on one setting; selling in several places, you decide for each of them.

Three ways to enter it

• By hand on the product. Sensible for the handful of products you know by heart.
• By Excel import. The value is part of the product import, both when adding and when updating, so you can set it across the whole catalogue at once.
• Through the API. The value is written when a product is added or updated, and a stock read returns it.

How much is worth holding back

There is no universal number, but there are two guides. The first is how fast the product sells: on a product that goes ten pieces a day, a reserve of five covers a few hours, while on a product that goes one a week it means five weeks of being unavailable. The second is how often the figure is sent to the shop: the rarer the transfer, the more reserve you need.

• On your best sellers. That is where the last pieces go fastest, so that is also where something that is not there gets sold most often.
• When selling on several channels. The more channels there are, the more lag there is between them.
• Ahead of the season. In November, when there are half as many orders again, stock runs down faster than usual.
• Not on one-off pieces. There a reserve simply means the product is not in the shop at all.

When a product is heading towards the end is shown by the minimum stock warning, and which product is holding up a particular order is visible in the order list. The feature is part of Order Management.

Instructions and further information:

MetaKocka support · Order Management · Ecommerce integrations