Pooled vs independent stock

If your organisation has more than one Shopify store, OrderOps needs to know whether they sell from one pile of stock or separate ones. That is a single setting with two models.

Pooled (the default)

All stores share one SKU pool. Receiving stock, manual adjustments and order deductions act on the shared total, and OrderOps mirrors that total to every connected store — each store's Shopify gets pushed the same number. A sale on one store reduces what the sister stores can sell, which is exactly what you want when two brands sell the same physical shelf.

Independent

Each store's stock is tracked separately, with no mirroring between stores. Use this when stores genuinely hold separate stock — different catalogues, or stock deliberately allocated per store. An adjustment on one store leaves the others untouched.

Source of truth

Shared SKUs drift: an app edits stock on one store, someone makes a manual change on another, and the counts stop agreeing. The source-of-truth setting nominates one store as authoritative — when sync runs, that store's levels overwrite mismatched SKUs on the other stores. Choose the store whose number you actually trust, usually the one your team edits.

What the models do not promise

• Sync is eventually consistent. Changes travel by webhook and background job — propagation is quick, but it is not one atomic cross-store transaction.
• Bin locations are picking labels, not stock partitions. Stock is tracked per SKU, not per bin.
• One dispatch location. Pooled stock does not make OrderOps multi-warehouse.