It was 9pm on a Saturday, and a customer in the shop wanted the last armchair in stock. The website had already sold it twenty minutes earlier. The shop manager called the owner, the owner called the delivery team, and the delivery team said the chair was still in the warehouse. Nobody knew the truth.
That is how a five-store furniture retailer with a web shop and two marketplaces ended up talking to ERPNext Consulting.
The real problem was not the double sale
The double sale was just the visible symptom. In a regular week this retailer was reconciling sales from four channels by hand every evening, and the numbers rarely matched. Stock-outs hit 18 percent of advertised items, and refunds for cancelled orders were eating up time and goodwill. The ERPNext Consulting team started with a simple rule: one central stock number, shared by every channel, updated at every sale.
How one count replaced four daily reconciliations
- Each channel gets the same stock level at the start of the day, and the system deducts a sale the moment it happens on any channel.
- Allocation rules reserve items for the in-store customer first when stock is below three units, because walk-in sales have no delivery cost.
- Staff receive a single consolidated pick list so the warehouse only touches each order once.
The numbers the owner now watches on Monday morning
After eight weeks, stock-out rates dropped from 18 percent to 4 percent, and the daily manual reconciliation simply disappeared. The owner told me the most valuable report is a simple one: items with fewer than three units across all channels, refreshed every morning. It tells him where to chase purchases before a problem starts.
The shift that made everything else possible was installing one shared stock record and insisting every channel connect to it. If you are an owner with two shops and a website, you can start this week: pick one spreadsheet, list your top 20 selling items, and update it from every channel every night for a fortnight. Then imagine what happens when the system does that for you automatically. That is exactly the leap ERPNext Consulting helped this five-store owner make.