Warehouse management, and why your warehouse should see your email calendar
Everything that happens to your stock inside the building: booking it in, finding it, picking it, packing it. Your shop's stock count is only as good as the warehouse's.
- 150Warehouse Management
- The process of overseeing the storage and movement of inventory within a warehouse, ensuring efficient operations and accurate order fulfilment.
- Runs on
- A warehouse management system (WMS)
- Feeds
- The stock count your shop, your ads and your emails all trust
- Biggest email risk
- A big send the warehouse didn't know was coming
What happens to stock inside the warehouse
- Goods in: the delivery is checked against the purchase order and counted
- Put away: every unit gets a location, so it can be found again
- Pick: orders are pulled from those locations, one by one or in batches
- Pack: the right box, the right filler, the insert you asked for
- Dispatch: parcels sorted by carrier before the collection cut-off
- Returns: checked, graded, and back on the shelf or written off
A warehouse management system, or WMS, is the software that tracks all of it. If a third-party logistics company, a 3PL, runs your warehouse, you're on their system, and the question that matters is how quickly it tells your shop what's changed.
Your emails trust the warehouse stock count
The warehouse count feeds Shopify, and Shopify feeds Klaviyo. Get it wrong at the start and every email downstream repeats the mistake.
- Stock delivered but not booked in shows as sold out, so the back in stock alert never fires
- Damaged units still on the count show as available, so the alert fires for stock that isn't there
- A slow sync oversells the last few, and the cancellation email does the apologising
Cycle counts fix most of it. Count a few locations every day, the fast movers most often, and the big annual count that shuts the building gets a lot less painful. Inventory management covers the planning side.
Warn the warehouse before a big send
A good campaign can land more orders in an evening than the team can pick in a day. If nobody warned them, those orders ship late, and the next morning's inbox fills with people asking where their parcel is.
Share the campaign calendar with whoever runs the warehouse. Flag launches, Black Friday and anything going to the whole list, and agree the dispatch promise before it goes in the email. Same for a new product: the day the lorry arrives isn't the day the stock is sellable.
Related terms
FAQs
Do we need a warehouse management system?
If you pack orders yourself from a few shelves, Shopify's stock tracking and a tidy room will do. Once you have staff picking, locations to remember or more than one building, a WMS stops the mistakes that come from memory. If you use a 3PL you already have one, so ask how often it syncs to your shop.
Why does our shop say in stock when the warehouse says it isn't?
Usually one of three things: a sync that runs too slowly, damaged units that were never written off, or stock promised to another channel, like wholesale, that your shop doesn't know about. Ask how often the count reaches your shop, and check the gap after a busy day, when it's widest.
How should a 3PL handle our returns?
Agree it in writing before the first one arrives: how quickly returns are checked, what counts as resellable, and when your shop is told. The refund email can only go out once the return is processed, so a slow returns desk becomes a slow refund, and a slow refund becomes a complaint.
Rather we explained it on your own account?
Bring your Klaviyo account to a growth consultation. We'll walk through what this means for your numbers, in plain English, and what we'd fix first.
Half an hour with Theo, our founder.
We're all about relationships built on trust, mutual respect and a shared vision for success. If that sounds like your vibe, let's make some waves together 🌊
