Here's a little of my little web and e-commerce knowledge for you... So there's a couple of ways stock can be managed with an online store: Everytime something is purchased the person responsible for the site will log in and update the stock levels on the site - pretty tedious but often what is found with smaller, more basic sites. The website itself has a backend database that will be updated with new stock and stock levels and then will independently keep track of stock levels - this is most often used but your issues come in when you have a sales floor and an online store, stock levels aren't going to match completely then and some manual effort is going to be needed to update it anyway. A full 3rd party sales integration, link between all stock sold on the floor and online, fully automated - my guess is this would be the system CWC and most other large quantity online stores use, they will receive their stock and input the details (product name, SKU, price, quantity) into the system which would then send those details in live time to the website then everytime something is bought or sold (either online or in the store) the details will travel back to the 3rd party system and then update the website accordingly. So if CWC do use the 3rd option there is always the possibility of a glitch/bug in the system from the 3rd party side and not much they'd be able to do about it (until too late), the other possibility is that perhaps 1 or 2 of the items were given away as a freebie to somebody and never recorded correctly so the system believes there is stock left but when somebody checks the storeroom to pack your order...oops gone! I'll probably think of something else to add to this but for now I cant...Hope that helps a bit Me personally, i'll still support them or anybody else that comes in cheaper.
