E-commerce and payments
What is Inventory management?
Inventory management is tracking what you have, where it is and what is committed to orders. On a small store the decisive question is not the software — it is whether stock is tracked per SKU, and what happens when two customers buy the last one simultaneously.
Also called: stock control · stock levels
The race condition every store has
Two customers add the last item and check out within the same second. Without a lock or a reservation at the point of order creation, both succeed, and one gets an apologetic email. The fix belongs in the database transaction, not in the interface.
Out of stock handling, for SEO
- Temporarily unavailable
- Keep the page indexed, set availability to OutOfStock, offer alternatives.
- Discontinued with a replacement
- 301 to the replacement product, not to the category.
- Discontinued with nothing similar
- Keep the page with a clear message, or 410 it.
- Seasonal
- Never delete. It rebuilds authority every year and you cannot buy that back.
The integration question
If stock lives in another system, decide early whether the website is the source of truth or a mirror. Two systems both believing they are authoritative is the most common cause of overselling.
Where this is covered in depth
A definition can only go so far. E-commerce website development: what the whole build actually involves covers this properly — 7 minutes, free, no email required.
Who wrote this
Anas Bin Masud builds e-commerce sites and does technical SEO for businesses in the UK, Canada and Pakistan. These definitions come from client work rather than from a content brief — where an entry describes a mistake, it is usually one found on a real site. More about how I work.