How do I stop selling something online that's already gone in the shop?

A customer orders online, you go to the shelf, and it is not there. It sold over the counter on Saturday, or it broke, or it went out on approval and never came back into the count. Then comes the sorry, we have actually sold that email, and a customer who may not order online again.

The cause is almost never the website. It is that the shop and the website are working from two different numbers, and the gap between them grows every time stock moves without anyone writing it down. Returns not put back, breakages not taken off, a size counted from memory.

Start by deciding which count is the truth. If your till and your online store already share stock, that shared count is it, and the job is making sure every movement goes through it. If they do not, pick one sheet as the master and treat the website as a copy that gets updated from it, never the other way round. Either way, everyone who serves at the counter should know which one it is.

Then count on the shelf on the day a delivery lands, not at a stocktake months later, and adjust the number the moment something breaks, comes back or goes out as a sample. Those small moments are where the drift comes from, and each one takes seconds to record when it happens and far longer to untangle later.

For your fastest sellers, it is worth holding the last one or two back from the website so the final piece on the shelf never sells twice. A product shown as sold out online for a day costs less than an apology email.

A Three Fixes report looks at how stock moves through your shop and your website today and writes the steps to keep one count honest in the tools you already use.