Reference
The operations
reference
These pages answer the questions that arrive before a platform decision and usually get taken after it: which system holds stock truth, which one owns the order promise, where the ledger takes its numbers from, and how any of it connects.
Vendor-neutral throughout, and that is a position rather than a hedge — no vendor can write the page that compares their competitors, which is why these are worth reading and their brochures are not.
What each system owns
Three questions the market sells as one product. Knowing which one you are actually asking changes what belongs on a shortlist.
Order management systems
What the order layer decides — which unit, from which location, to which customer, in what priority — and the four things that break when nothing owns that decision.
Stock control software
Stock is four numbers and most systems publish one. On hand, committed, available, incoming — and which system is allowed to be right when two of them disagree.
Shopify inventory management
What the platform already does with stock across locations, where it genuinely stops, and the four reasons — the only four — to add anything alongside it.
Stock as an operation
Before any of it is a software decision it is a floor, a supplier and a number somebody has to be honest about.
Stock and fulfilment
The symptom most merchants arrive with: why stock desynchronises, what overselling actually costs, and how to work out whether a WMS or a 3PL is cheaper.
Inventory planning
The reorder-point arithmetic is one line. The inputs are estimates that each lie in a characteristic direction, and that is where the money is won or lost.
Consigned stock
Stock in one party’s building and another party’s ownership. Which direction it runs, the four moments title can pass at, and why one stock number cannot hold it.
The ledger, and the wiring
Where the money lands after all of the above, and how any of it is physically joined to Shopify Plus.
Accounting and stock
Where the ledger sits when a storefront, a stock system and an accounting package all have to agree, and the four reconciliations that break first.
Shopify and Xero
Four things have to cross and only one is the sale. The summary-versus-invoice decision shapes the ledger permanently, and it is usually made by a default.
Systems that work with Shopify Plus
The four ways an ERP, WMS or stock system connects to Plus, and where each connection type breaks. Every commercial relationship declared.
What is not written yet
Every page above stops at the same line, and it is the same line for all of them: the per-vendor rows. Which product genuinely holds committed stock per location, which connector survives a channel going down mid-sync, what each arrangement costs to run rather than to licence.
We have not implemented across that field at this merchant size. A feature grid assembled from vendor datasheets is indistinguishable, to a reader, from one built out of implementations — and only one of them is worth anything. Those rows appear named, dated and attributed as real implementations produce them.
The diagnostic is the version of this that does not need a case study: which system is nominated to be right today, where the order promise is made, and which reconciliations are already being done by a person.
Book the diagnosticTell us what is breaking
What the systems are doing now, and what you need them to do. We will tell you whether it is a platform problem or something cheaper.