One stock, two doors: running a store and a webshop on the same shelf

Most brands we talk to did not plan to be omnichannel. They opened a shop, then added a webshop during a quiet season, or started online and took a lease when the brand got big enough to deserve a window. Either way, the result is the same: one pool of stock, two places selling from it, and a stock count that is right somewhere between never and Friday afternoon.

The classic failure is the Saturday sale. A customer buys the last pair in the shop at two o'clock. At half past two someone orders the same pair online. The webshop said "1 in stock" because nobody had moved the sale across yet. Now you have a refund, an apology email, and a review you did not need.

Where it is matters more than how much

A single number for "stock" is the wrong unit the moment you have two doors. What you need is stock by location, and a rule for which door sells from which pile.

Hylla keeps a stock level per location: shop floor, back room, warehouse, the 3PL, and whatever is on the way. The webshop sells from the locations you say it can sell from. Most brands let the online store sell from the warehouse and the back room, but not the shop floor, so the display pair is never sold twice. Others pool everything and accept the occasional conflict in return for never showing "sold out". Both are fine. What matters is that it is a decision, not an accident.

Sales from both doors, one picture

Shopify POS and your webshop both feed Hylla, so every sale, wherever it happens, counts down the same stock and feeds the same sell through. That is more useful than it sounds. The shop tells you what people pick up and put back. The webshop tells you what people search for and what sells in Norrland. Put together, the reorder point for each product reflects your whole business, not the half of it that happened to be in the spreadsheet.

It also fixes the quiet problem of transfers. When the shop runs low and you move twenty units from the warehouse, Hylla logs the transfer, and the webshop stops counting those units the moment they leave. No more "it says we have it but it is in a box in the car".

Who gets the last unit

With one pile and two doors, someone has to decide who gets the last unit when both want it. Hylla lets you set a floor per channel: keep two of each size on the shop floor no matter what the webshop does, or reserve the last five of a drop for the store because walk in customers do not get a back order option. When stock falls to the floor, the webshop shows the honest state, and the shop keeps selling.

The same rule works in reverse for the end of a season. Pull the floor, let the webshop sell through what is left in the shop, and ship from the store counter. Hylla treats the store as a location that can fulfil, so clearing the last units does not mean carrying boxes to the warehouse first.

Reordering for both

The reorder point is where it all comes together. Lead time from the supplier is the same whichever door sells the unit, so Hylla plans one order per product, sized for total demand, and tells you how to split the delivery between locations when it lands. If the shop sells sixty percent of a product and online sells forty, the suggestion says so.

Receiving works the same way. Scan the delivery in at the warehouse, move the shop's share across, and both doors are back to a number you can trust.

What changes day to day

Honestly, not much, and that is the point. The shop keeps using its POS. The webshop keeps running. What goes away is the Friday count, the "do we have this in the back?" phone calls between the shop and whoever runs the online side, and the Saturday refund. What arrives is one short list every Monday: what to order, how much, and which door it is going to.

If you run a shop and a webshop from the same stock, start a free trial. Connect your Shopify store with its POS locations, and the first reorder suggestions show up the same day.