This page is for a buyer at a retail chain who already knows how to approve open-to-buy for a season and how to read a weekly sales, stock and intake plan, but has never had to decide exactly which of the chain's own stores receive a confirmed shipment. At work, a buyer who stops at open-to-buy and the WSSI has only decided how many pieces to buy for the whole season and which week they should arrive at the distribution centre; neither decision says whether Store 1 gets 400 pieces and Store 10 gets ten. This lesson mainly teaches the information flow: it shows the boundary between what a season plan already fixes and what allocation still has to decide once stock is sitting in the warehouse.
Fairway Stores has approved open-to-buy for 15,000 pieces of Order A and built a WSSI that says the first 1,000 pieces should reach its distribution centre in week one of the season. Without an allocation decision, that 1,000 pieces has nowhere specific to go: it cannot simply be split evenly across Fairway Stores' own ten stores, because a flagship store on a busy street sells this style faster than a small-format store in a quiet suburb.
You need: no previous lesson from this track. A working knowledge of open-to-buy and a WSSI, as taught in Track 20, is assumed but not required to follow the numbers here.
By the end of this lesson you can:
Not covered here: the actual store-level calculation, covered from lesson T21-C01-L02 onward, and choosing between allocation methods, covered in lesson T21-C01-L03.
| Term | Meaning |
|---|---|
| Store allocation | Splitting a confirmed shipment quantity across a retailer's own stores or shops, rather than shipping it all to one central point. |
| Selling potential | An estimate of how much a specific store is likely to sell, usually built from that store's own past weekly sales rate for a similar style. |
| Store base | The specific set of stores counted in a sales comparison; it must stay the same in both periods for a like-for-like comparison to be valid. |
| Intake | New stock arriving into a retailer's own stockroom or distribution centre in a given week, from a confirmed order. |
| Weekly sales rate | The average number of pieces of a style sold in one week, found by dividing total pieces sold by the number of weeks elapsed. |
| Distribution centre | The central warehouse a retailer's confirmed shipments arrive at before any onward decision splits stock toward individual stores. |
Open-to-buy sets a season's own total spending limit before individual stores are considered at all, and a WSSI turns that season total into a week-by-week plan of sales, stock and intake for the retailer as a whole. Neither decision reaches down to a single store: both stop at the retailer's own distribution centre door. Allocation is the separate decision that takes a confirmed shipment quantity, already approved by open-to-buy and already phased by the WSSI, and splits it across the retailer's own individual stores according to each store's own selling potential.
| What can differ | The shapes you will meet | Why it matters |
|---|---|---|
| Export order into a multi-store chain | Fairway Stores receives Order A's own first 1,000-piece shipment at one distribution centre and must then split it across its own 10 stores. | A single landed shipment is not automatically the right quantity for any one store; the split still has to be decided store by store. |
| Domestic Make to Stock reorder | A domestic retailer such as Cedar & Co. reorders from Delta Garments against its own forecast and then allocates the reorder across its own 12 shops. | A reorder's allocation can use real, recent store sales data, unlike a first shipment, which has no sales history of its own yet. |
| Make to Order first shipment, no store sales history yet | Order A's first 1,000 pieces have never been sold in any Fairway Stores shop before, so allocation must rely on a comparable style's own past selling potential instead of this style's own history. | Without a comparable style's own history, a buyer risks allocating on guesswork rather than on any real store-level signal. |
| Hybrid model, initial batch plus a later reorder | A first batch is allocated by estimated selling potential; a later reorder, once real sell-through exists, is allocated by each store's own actual results instead. | The right allocation method actually changes partway through a season, once real store-level data becomes available. |
Fairway Stores has already done the two things open-to-buy and a WSSI ask of it: it approved 15,000 pieces of open-to-buy for Order A's season, and its WSSI phased the first 1,000 pieces to land at the distribution centre in week one. Neither of those approvals says how many of those 1,000 pieces should go to any specific one of Fairway Stores' own 10 stores. The buyer preparing this shipment for allocation has to bring in a third kind of information entirely: each store's own selling potential.
An evenly spread allocation of 100 pieces per store is a real option, and lesson T21-C01-L03 covers it as one method among several. The point this lesson makes is narrower: 100 pieces per store is a number that open-to-buy and the WSSI never produced and never checked against any store's own selling potential. It came only from dividing the shipment by the store count, which is exactly the kind of allocation decision neither of the earlier approvals made.
The methodA common mistake is a buyer assuming that once open-to-buy is approved and the WSSI shows a shipment landing on schedule, the planning work for that shipment is finished. It is not: the WSSI only confirms that 1,000 pieces will exist at the distribution centre in week one, and says nothing about whether Store 1, a flagship location, should receive 400 of those pieces while Store 10, a small-format shop, receives ten. What this costs is real: a shipment left to default to an even split across Fairway Stores' own 10 stores can leave a high-potential store under-stocked within days while a low-potential store still holds most of its own share weeks later, even though the season-level open-to-buy and WSSI numbers both looked correct throughout. This is exactly the gap allocation exists to close, and it closes it only when someone actually makes the store-by-store decision, not when a shipment merely arrives on time.
A season's buying budget says how much stock a retailer can afford for a whole season, and a weekly plan says which week that stock should arrive at the warehouse. Neither one says which shop actually gets the stock once it lands. That third decision, splitting one shipment across many shops based on how well each shop is likely to sell it, is allocation, and it has to be made separately every time a shipment reaches the warehouse door. A shop on a busy street and a small shop in a quiet area are rarely owed the same number of pieces, even from the very same box.
Fairway Stores' distribution centre confirms that Order A's own first 1,000-piece shipment has landed exactly as the WSSI planned for week one. The buyer's manager asks whether the shipment is "ready to go" to the stores.
Is the shipment actually ready to reach stores once this note is received? Decide before opening the answer.
No, not yet. The note confirms only that open-to-buy's own approved quantity and the WSSI's own planned arrival date were both met.
First, open-to-buy approved 15,000 pieces for the season, and the WSSI phased 1,000 of them into week one. Both of those figures are now confirmed as correct.
Second, neither figure says how many of the 1,000 pieces go to any of Fairway Stores' own 10 stores. "Awaiting further instruction before dispatch" is exactly that missing instruction: the allocation decision.
The buyer still has to decide each store's own share before dispatch can happen, using each store's own selling potential rather than treating "received on schedule" as the end of the planning work.
Using this lesson's own illustrative figures:
A flagship store with an estimated weekly sales rate of 20 pieces, given only 100 pieces under an even split, holds roughly five weeks of stock cover rather than the longer cover a higher allocation would give it, risking a stock-out and lost sales at exactly the store best placed to sell Order A quickly. Getting allocation right, instead of defaulting to an even split, is what the next lesson in this course actually teaches.
Open the course workbook's "Decision map" sheet. It lists open-to-buy's own approved season figures, the WSSI's own phased shipment figures, and a blank store-by-store allocation table for you to complete in later lessons of this course, so you can see all three decisions side by side on one sheet before the calculation itself is introduced.
[Download the Store allocation worksheet](../../templates/T21-C01-store-allocation-worksheet.xlsx)
1. What does an approved WSSI actually confirm about a shipment?
2. A retailer has 10 stores and a first shipment of 1,000 pieces with no store-level decision made yet. What is the safest description of this situation?
| EN | AR | FR | TR | Meaning |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Store allocation | توزيع المحلات | Répartition entre magasins | Mağaza tahsisi | Splitting a confirmed shipment quantity across a retailer's own stores or shops, rather than shipping it all to one central point. |
| Selling potential | إمكانية البيع | Potentiel de vente | Satış potansiyeli | An estimate of how much a specific store is likely to sell, usually built from that store's own past weekly sales rate for a similar style. |
| Store base | قاعدة المحلات | Base de magasins | Mağaza tabanı | The specific set of stores counted in a sales comparison; it must stay the same in both periods for a like-for-like comparison to be valid. |
| Intake | الوارد | Arrivage | Mal girişi (intake) | New stock arriving into a retailer's own stockroom or distribution centre in a given week, from a confirmed order. |
| Weekly sales rate | معدل المبيعات الأسبوعي | Taux de vente hebdomadaire | Haftalık satış oranı | The average number of pieces of a style sold in one week, found by dividing total pieces sold by the number of weeks elapsed. |
| Distribution centre | مركز التوزيع | Centre de distribution | Dağıtım merkezi | The central warehouse a retailer's confirmed shipments arrive at before any onward decision splits stock toward individual stores. |
You now know what allocation decides that open-to-buy and a season plan do not. The next lesson shows how to actually split a first shipment across stores using each store's own selling potential. Back to the course map