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library · field guide

Availability lists: Friction, Published Weekly.

You export the week’s availability, tidy it into a spreadsheet, and email it round the trade on Monday. By Tuesday half of it has sold, a line is oversold, and you spend the rest of the week apologising for a document that was out of date before it left your outbox. The list was never the problem. The idea of a list was.

the shift

A list is a photograph. Stock is a film.

An availability list freezes one moment and pretends it lasts a week. Real stock is moving the whole time — selling, shipping, arriving. The only availability worth publishing is the one that keeps up.

the weekly fiction

The spreadsheet that’s wrong by Tuesday.

Every grower who sells to the trade knows the ritual. Someone pulls the week’s availability, cleans it up, and sends it out — a spreadsheet, a PDF, an email with a list of what’s ready and how many. It feels like service. It is, for about a day.

Then the selling starts. A wholesale customer rings to order twenty of a line that sold out on Monday afternoon. Two buyers both claim the same batch. A grade that came good midweek isn’t on the list at all, so it sits unsold while you field calls about things you no longer have. The list didn’t lie when you sent it. It just stopped being true the moment stock moved, and stock moves constantly.

The instinct is to send the list more often: twice a week, then daily. But a fresher snapshot is still a snapshot. The fix is to stop publishing a list. Let customers see and order against what is genuinely free right now, from the same records that hold the true number, instead of a copy that started ageing the instant it was sent.

Stock isn’t a number you type. It’s a number you compute.

why the list drifts

Stock isn’t a number you type. It’s a number you compute.

The reason an availability list ages so fast is that in most systems "quantity in stock" is a figure someone edits by hand — and the moment it’s copied into a spreadsheet, the copy and the reality start drifting apart.

The fix is to stop storing stock as a number at all. Treat every change (receive, move, ship, return, reserve, allocate) as a logged movement, and work out the current quantity by adding them all up, live. Do that and the figure is always a true reflection of what actually happened. That’s the difference between a list, which is right only at the instant it was made, and a feed, which is right every time you look, because it’s recomputed from events rather than retyped by a person.

What’s left after everything spoken for.

publish the right number

What’s left after everything spoken for.

The number that starts a fight is the one that counts plants on the bench but ignores the ones already promised. What a buyer needs to see is free stock — what’s left once everything spoken for is set aside.

The distinction is worth making formal. Stock committed to a confirmed order is allocated, a firm hold on specific stock, while a quote only reserves it, a soft "set this aside while they decide". Publish availability net of both, and a customer can’t order the last one twice, because it was never offered twice. Perishable nursery stock makes this sharper still: you want the grade that just came ready on the feed the same day, and the tray you just shipped taken off it the same day too.

the better model

Let them order the plant, not the promise.

A live feed matters because the customer can act on it directly. When looking and ordering are the same motion, the availability can never go stale between the two.

A list creates a gap: the customer reads it, decides, then phones or emails an order — and in that gap the stock can move. Every step between seeing availability and placing the order is a chance for the two to disagree.

Close the gap and the problem disappears. If the buyer browses live availability and checks out against it in one motion, there is no window for the number to drift. They are ordering from the stock as it stands the second they click, rather than from a document you sent on Monday. That’s the shift from broadcasting availability to transacting on it.

A portal instead of a PDF.

close the gap

A portal instead of a PDF.

The way to make availability truly live is to let customers order against it directly. Instead of keying in the orders your customers phone or email through, give them somewhere to log in and place them themselves: browsing your catalogue, building a saved cart, and checking out, with those orders landing straight in your system as ordinary orders to fulfil.

Because they’re transacting against the same figures that are computed live, the availability they order from is the real one. A cart is just intent; it becomes a firm order only at checkout, at which point the stock is committed like any other order. A trade portal like this usually stays out of payments, so it slots into however you already invoice and get paid.

You choose exactly what they see.

you stay in control

You choose exactly what they see.

A live feed doesn’t mean throwing your whole catalogue open. The portal should show a curated subset: only the categories, products and variants you’ve chosen to publish, with their own customer-facing titles, descriptions and images. You decide precisely what your trade customers see online, and what stays back-of-house.

Access is worth scoping too: buyers who transact (browse, build a cart, check out) versus agents or reps who only need read-only access to browse the range and see a customer’s prices without placing orders. The result is a feed that’s live where it matters and controlled where it counts.

atlas core

How Atlas Core keeps availability live

Atlas Core replaces the stale list with a system that’s current by design:

  • Stock computed from movements — never an edited number, so every availability figure is a live reflection of what actually happened.
  • Free stock, honestly — hard allocations for orders and soft reservations for quotes, so published availability is what’s genuinely uncommitted and the last one can’t sell twice.
  • The Aviso B2B portal — trade customers log in, browse a curated catalogue, build carts and check out against live stock, with orders landing straight in Atlas Core (and payments kept separate, the way you already work).
  • Publish on your terms — a chosen subset of categories, products and variants with portal-facing titles and images, plus transacting customer logins and read-only agent logins, so the feed is live where it should be and controlled where it must be.

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See how Atlas Core retires the Monday spreadsheet.

Live stock, honest free-to-sell figures, and a portal your customers order from — see how it fits your nursery.

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