library · field guide

Which shop does the website ship from?

Most webshops are built on a comfortable fiction: that behind the checkout button sits one warehouse holding everything. A nursery group does not have one warehouse. It has tunnels, fields, a holding yard and three shop floors in different towns — and the plant a customer just bought is standing in exactly one of them.

the fiction

There is no warehouse. There are benches, in different towns.

A single stock number that does not say where the stock is will eventually sell something from a site that cannot ship it. The question is never only "do we have one?" — it is "which one, and who is nearest to it?"

the order nobody can pick

The website said yes. The picking list says nowhere.

The order lands overnight. Three lines: a Photinia in a 10-litre pot, two bags of ericaceous compost, one specimen olive. The website was confident about all four items, because the website was adding up every unit the group owns and calling the total "in stock."

By the time someone tries to pick it, the picture is different. The Photinia is on the far site, forty minutes away. The compost is behind the till at the town-centre branch, in the aisle, where a walk-in customer could pick up a bag on the way past. The olive is genuinely there — but it is the one specimen the manager has been holding for a landscaper who is coming to look at it on Thursday.

None of this is a stock error. Every number was true. What was missing was place. And the cost of that omission is not abstract: it is a same-day transfer van, a phone call to a customer explaining that half their order will follow next week, or the quiet decision to cancel the line and hope nobody notices. For a business with more than one site, "do we have it?" stopped being a useful question a long time ago.

stock has an address

The same plant in two places is two different things.

The fix begins by refusing to average. Stock is a quantity of a specific lot in a specific place. Two hundred Photinia on the home nursery and forty at the garden centre are not two hundred and forty Photinia: they are two holdings with different ages, different costs and completely different abilities to reach a customer this week.

That means places have to be real in the system, and real at the granularity you actually work at: the site, then the tunnel or the shop floor, then the bench or the aisle. Broad enough at the top to answer "which branch?", fine enough at the bottom that whoever is picking knows where to walk.

Once place is part of the record rather than folklore, the awkward questions become answerable ones. What can this branch ship today? Which site should this order come from? Where is the stock we keep forgetting we own? A stock figure with an address on it is worth several times one without.

the decision, made once

Choosing the branch is an allocation, not a guess.

Every order eventually has to be tied to particular stock, and the moment that happens is the moment the shipping branch is chosen. Do it deliberately and it is a rule; leave it to whoever opens the order first and it is a habit that changes with the weather.

Three questions decide it. Which lot goes first: oldest away first, or soonest to spoil, which matters more with living goods than with anything boxed. When the commitment happens: as soon as the order is raised, or not until a shipment is actually being built, which is the difference between holding stock for orders that may still change and finding it gone when you finally pick. And how the commitment is shaped: spread across several lots and sites, or insisted on from a single one, because a customer who ordered twelve matching specimens for a scheme will not thank you for six from each end of the county.

Set those rules once, per product, and the answer to "which shop ships this?" stops being an argument at eight in the morning.

distance

The cheapest mile is the one you never drive.

Every internal transfer is a journey that earns nothing and costs a plant something. A stock number that knows where it is lets an order leave from the site nearest the customer — instead of touring your own estate first.

The default in a multi-site business is to hoard the picking in one place. Everything is transferred to the despatch shed, and the despatch shed sends everything out. It feels tidy, and it is quietly expensive: an extra handling, an extra loading, an extra day in a dark van, and a delivery leg that starts from the wrong end of the country.

Shipping direct from the holding branch removes all of that — but only where the branch can behave like a despatch point. That means it needs its own picking, its own paperwork and its own carrier arrangements, and it needs the delivery charge to be worked out from where the goods actually start, not from head office. Zone- and distance-based charges quietly stop making sense the moment the origin is fictional.

There is a third option people forget, and it is often the best one. If the customer is closer to a shop than to any van route, the cheapest fulfilment is no fulfilment at all: reserve the plant at that branch and let them collect it. For a garden centre group, click-and-collect is a delivery leg you never had to pay for, and a customer standing in your shop with a trolley.

the awkward site

A shop floor is a warehouse anyone can walk into.

Branch fulfilment has one hazard a warehouse never has: the stock is standing where the public can reach it. The last Acer on the display bench is simultaneously the one your website just sold and the one a customer is at this moment carrying towards the till. One of those two people is going to be disappointed, and it will not be the one holding the plant.

So a shop's stock cannot be treated as freely sellable online just because it exists. It has to be held properly the moment the web order commits to it — physically moved to a collection area where possible, and marked as committed in the system in a way the till respects. The till and the website have to be drawing on the same pool, or you have simply chosen which channel gets to be wrong.

This is also why "how much can I sell?" and "how much is standing there?" are different numbers. Free stock is what remains after everything already promised is subtracted. A branch that publishes its shelf count rather than its free count is selling the same plant twice by design.

one order, two vans

Let an order leave from more than one place.

Once you accept that stock lives in several places, you have to accept that one order may sensibly leave from several of them. The compost goes out on the town-centre van tomorrow; the specimen olive follows on the nursery lorry next week when there is a proper load going that way. Forcing both into one shipment means either an unnecessary transfer or a customer waiting a week for a bag of compost.

That only works if a shipment is its own thing, separate from the order. One order, several despatches, each with its own picked lines, carrier and paperwork travelling with it, and, for plants for planting, its own passport details for the batches actually on that vehicle. Back-orders stop being a failure state and become a normal second shipment.

What the customer must never see is the mess behind it. One order number, one running status, and a clear message about what has gone and what is still to come. Internally it is two branches and two vehicles; to the buyer it should read as one purchase being looked after properly.

atlas core

How Atlas Core ships from the right branch

Atlas Core is built around the idea that stock has an address, so branch fulfilment is the normal case rather than a workaround:

Locations are a tree, as fine as you need. A location can be a whole site, a greenhouse, a field, a bench, a warehouse, an aisle, a shelf, a quarantine area, even a vehicle or a customer's site, nested as deeply as your setup requires.
A batch is one variant in one location. The same variant on two sites is genuinely two batches, each with its own cost, expiry and sellable flag, so a group total can always be broken back down by place.
Stock is the sum of its movements. Every receive, move, ship, reserve, allocate or scrap is a logged transaction and the quantity is derived live, so a branch figure is never a number someone typed.
Allocation rules are set per product: the strategy (FIFO, LIFO or soonest-to-expire first), the type (commit when the order is raised, when a delivery is created, or by hand) and the tactic (spread across batches, insist on a single batch, or allow a back-order).
Soft and hard holds are different things. Quotes reserve stock; orders allocate it. Stock is never committed at the moment of shipping, always beforehand, so the picking list cannot surprise you.
One order can have several deliveries. Partial shipments and back-orders are normal, each delivery carrying its own status, packs, carrier or your own vehicle, and its own delivery note, which prints the plant passport for every passportable batch on it.
Delivery charges are built from components: flat fee, weight, distance, units, order value, volume or postcode zone, each with tiers, so a branch-origin charge is a configuration rather than a fudge. Click & Collect is simply another delivery method.
The till draws on the same stock. Atlas Cassa records the counter sale and pushes it into Atlas Core, so the shop floor and the webshop are never two sets of books.

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Sell from everywhere. Ship from somewhere real.

Atlas Core holds your stock where it actually stands, at the site, tunnel, bench or shop floor, so an online order can be fulfilled by the branch that has the plant. Talk to us about multi-site fulfilment for your group.

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