Overselling: the channel sold a unit the warehouse cannot ship

What it looks like on the floor

The order prints. The picker walks to the bin and finds three units. The order is for five. The channel said seven were available, because the channel was told seven yesterday afternoon, and since then a wholesale order took four and a return came back damaged.

Nobody made a mistake. The number was simply old.

Why it happens

Most overselling has one of three roots. The quantity was pushed to the channel on a schedule, so it was true at the top of the hour and stale by ten past. The quantity was computed by a client screen, so it agreed with the warehouse until the day it did not. Or the quantity was an undifferentiated total that counted damaged stock, dock stock and allocated stock as sellable.

All three are the same mistake in different clothes: the channel’s number and the warehouse’s number are two numbers.

What DockingWare does

There is one number. Available to promise is computed on the server from the ledger, once, for every product: pick-face stock plus bulk stock, minus what earlier orders already own. Damaged, quarantined and not-yet-put-away stock are never in it.

That number is published to every connected channel after each movement that changes it, not on a timer. A pick, a return, a cycle-count adjustment, an allocation: each one writes a row and the row triggers the publish. A reconciliation pass also compares what the channel holds against what the warehouse says and names the difference.

When you want a margin, you set it per product. Hold back a fixed number of pieces, publish only a percentage, or both; the more conservative result is what the channel sees, and the held-back stock stays fully available to wholesale. If a product is a component in a kit, its reserve also shrinks what the kit can promise.

Allocation is piece-exact. Two orders cannot own the same unit. If demand exceeds what is left, the order is short by name and says so on its own page; nothing is silently rounded.

What it does not do

It does not stop a channel from accepting an order the channel itself decided to accept. Marketplaces sometimes sell through their own buffer. What DockingWare guarantees is that the number the channel was given was true at the moment it was given, and that when the order arrives, the shortage is visible immediately instead of at the bin.

What you can verify

Every rule above is enforced in code and covered by a test that fails first, then passes. The changelog names the version each one shipped in.