A customer walks in and asks for the black formal shoe in size 8. The screen says you have 40 pairs of that article. The shelf has sizes 6, 9 and 10, and no 8. The customer leaves, and the sale goes to the shop down the road.

That gap between “40 pairs” and “no size 8” is the most common stock problem we see in footwear shops, and it starts on the first day the software is set up.

The mistake most shoe shops make

When a footwear shop starts with billing software, the quickest thing to do is enter each article once, with its total quantity: “Formal shoe, black, 40 pairs.” It is fast, and it feels like the stock is in the system.

But a shoe shop never sells “a pair of the black formal shoe”. It sells a size 8 in black. Once the stock is recorded as one total, the software can tell you how many pairs you have, but not which ones. You can’t see that the popular sizes are gone, you can’t reorder them, and the slow sizes quietly pile up.

Of everything we see when footwear shops go live, this is the biggest mistake: entering a total quantity against the product, and not using variants.

Variants: one article, every size and colour

Stock2Track handles this with a feature called Variants. You create the article once, then add its sizes (for example 6 to 10) and its colours as variants. Each size-and-colour combination then carries its own stock.

So “40 pairs” becomes something you can act on: 8 in size 6, 10 in size 7, none in size 8, 12 in size 9 and 10 in size 10. Every sale reduces the exact variant sold, and every purchase adds to the exact sizes received.

Setting this up takes a little longer on the first day. It saves time on every day after that.

Labels that carry the size

Variants only work if the counter sells the right one. That is why the barcode label matters. In Stock2Track, the barcode templates have provision to print the size on the label, so each box carries its own size and its own code. At the counter, scanning the box bills the exact variant, with no choosing from a list and no guessing.

The label printing page explains how labels are designed and printed on any standard Windows label printer.

Reorder by size, not by article

Because every size has its own stock, reorder levels can work per size too. When size 8 runs low, Stock2Track can raise the shortfall as a purchase order for that size, without reordering the sizes you already have too many of. Over a season, this is where the money is: buying more of what sells, and less of what sits. The details are on the automatic purchase orders page.

Broken size sets: a job for your eyes

Footwear owners talk about a broken set: an article where the middle sizes have sold out and only the edges are left. Stock2Track does not flag broken sets automatically, and we think the manual way is better here.

Which sizes count as “the middle” depends on your customers, your area and the article. A men’s formal shoe and a children’s sandal break in different places. The owner knows this better than any rule. What the software gives you is the size-wise stock on one screen, so the check takes minutes instead of a walk through the godown.

A simple routine works well. Once a week, look at the size-wise stock of your top-selling articles. Wherever a fast size is empty and the edge sizes are full, decide whether to reorder that size, move stock from another branch, or mark the article down before the season ends.

Starting right

If you are setting up Stock2Track for a footwear shop, or moving to it, do one thing differently from most shops: enter your opening stock by variant, size by size, from the start. It is the one piece of work that makes everything else in this article possible.

The footwear billing page covers the rest, from exchanges to barcode tags. If you would like to see your own articles set up as variants, book a free demo and bring a few box labels with you.