What is a reservation?
When a customer places an order on any of your sales channels (Amazon, eBay, Allegro, PrestaShop, …), Sugibana Flow immediately reserves the ordered quantity. This stops the same physical stock from being sold twice across two different channels.
Think of a reservation as a soft hold on your warehouse shelf: the items are still physically there, but they're earmarked for that buyer until the order ships or is cancelled.
Available stock is what you can still safely sell. It equals your physical stock (On Hand) minus everything currently reserved across all your channels combined.
How does a reservation move through its lifecycle?
Every order follows the same lifecycle, regardless of which marketplace it came from:
- Order arrives — the customer places an order on Amazon / eBay / Allegro / etc.
- Reservation created — the ordered quantity is locked immediately. Available stock drops right away, even though nothing has shipped yet.
- You ship the order — the reserved quantity is deducted from On Hand and the reservation converts into a final, confirmed sale.
- Done — On Hand is reduced, and Available/Reserved both settle to reflect the final state.
If the order is cancelled at any point before shipping, the reservation is released and the quantity returns to Available immediately.
What are the reservation states?
- Active — quantity is locked; the order is placed and awaiting shipment. This stock is not available for sale on any channel.
- Converted — the order has shipped. The reserved quantity has been deducted from On Hand as a confirmed sale, and the reservation is closed.
- Released — the order was cancelled (or the reservation expired). The locked quantity is returned to Available stock.
- Expired — the reservation timed out automatically without a ship or cancel event coming through. Treated the same as Released: the stock returns to Available.
How is inventory kept in sync when I sell the same SKU on several channels at once?
Every channel a SKU is live on shares the same Available number. As soon as an order comes in on any one channel, that quantity is reserved and Available drops for every channel at once — so the next channel to sync sees the reduced number and won't oversell it. If an order is cancelled on one channel, the freed-up quantity becomes available again immediately, even while orders on your other channels are still active. Sugibana Flow computes this automatically and pushes the updated quantity to your connected channels on each sync cycle.
Can the same order be reserved twice (a duplicate reservation)?
No. Every reservation has a unique key built from the channel, the order ID, and the line ID. If Sugibana Flow receives the same order event more than once — for example because a channel retried a notification after a delay — it silently recognizes the duplicate and ignores it. Stock is never double-reserved, and you won't see the same order counted twice against your Available quantity.
What happens if several channels sell my very last unit at the same time?
Reservations are handled on a first-come, first-served basis: the first order to be processed locks the remaining stock. If a second order arrives for that same SKU while Available is already at 0, it can't be satisfied from stock you don't have — Sugibana Flow detects this automatically and opens a case in Cases so you (or support) can resolve it (for example, by cancelling the oversold order or sourcing more stock).
Is my reserved stock still shown as available to my other channels?
No. Reserved quantity is deducted from Available *before* anything syncs to a channel. If your Available is 2, that's the maximum quantity that will be pushed to every one of your channels on the next sync — regardless of how much is physically On Hand.
What if a reservation gets stuck?
Networks are imperfect — occasionally a marketplace notifies Sugibana Flow about a shipped order late, or a notification is missed entirely. To guard against that, two automatic safety checks run in the background:
- Every 5 minutes — scans active reservations across every channel; if the order is already Shipped or Cancelled on the channel but the reservation is still Active, it's fixed automatically.
- Every 30 minutes — a deeper per-tenant check for orphaned or mismatched reservations, which is also auto-repaired, opening a case in Cases only if something needs your review.
You don't need to do anything to trigger this — it runs continuously. If you ever see a RELEASE entry on a SKU's Movements tab with a note about a "stuck reservation," this is what fixed it.
Where can I see this for a specific SKU?
Every SKU has a Movements tab listing every event that affected its stock, in order — including RESERVE (an order locked stock), RELEASE (an order was cancelled or a stuck reservation was cleared), and SHIPPED (the reservation converted into a final sale). This is the fastest way to answer "why does this SKU's number look like that right now."
FAQ
Why does my Available quantity show 0 even though items are physically in the warehouse? All of your On Hand units are currently reserved by active orders. Check the Orders page for Unshipped orders on each channel — once those ship (or are cancelled), the quantity returns to Available.
An order was cancelled on the marketplace, but its reservation still shows Active — what happened? The automatic reconciler catches this within 5–30 minutes and releases the reservation on its own. If it's still Active after 30 minutes, open a case in Cases so support can release it and look into why it was missed.