The Operational Guides
Eleven guides on the operational work behind a Shopify store turning over between roughly £250,000 and £1m: stock, purchasing, returns, and the messaging that depends on all three. They are written to be read once and returned to, not followed as a course. Each one states its assumptions, and says plainly where the advice stops working.
Start here
What changed in 2026, and what a store this size actually needs to run on.
Inventory and buying
How much to hold, how to name it, where to keep it, and how to reorder it.
Guide 03
Reorder Points, Lead Times and Cover
A defensible reorder point built from Shopify's own exports, in an afternoon.
Guide 05
SKU Naming and Variant Structure
A convention worth copying, and how to repair yours without destroying sales history.
Guide 07
Adding a Second Stock Location
The five things that break the moment you add one, and the drift that follows.
Guide 08
Supplier Ordering Without a Planning System
What Shopify's purchase orders will not do, and the supplier record you need alongside.
Demand and recovery
What happens downstream of stock: advertising, messaging, returns and peak.
Guide 04
Advertising Into Out-of-Stock
Why a channel keeps spending against a variant you cannot ship, and how to measure it.
Guide 06
Inventory-Aware Messaging
Five ways recovery messaging misfires, and which of them you can configure away.
Guide 09
Return to Resale
Closing the gap between a return arriving and the unit being sellable again.
Guide 10
Q4 Operational Readiness
Your last useful order date, the freeze, and how peak behaves under volume.
Guide 11
Where the Week Goes
A two-week log, an honest hourly rate, and what to do with the answer.
Resources
Companion material to the guides above. The spreadsheets download immediately — no email, no form.
Page
Six Shopify Flow Workflows Worth Building
Six workflows, free on every paid Shopify plan, none longer than fifteen minutes.
Download
Reorder point calculator
An Excel workbook that takes your Shopify sell-through export and returns a reorder point per variant. No email required.
Download
Two-week time audit
The log sheet described below, with the categories and the annualised totals already built. No email required.