The shop floor and the website should not be able to disagree

A shop with a website and a till usually has two of everything. Two product lists that started identical and stopped being so about four months in. Two places to change a price, one of which somebody always forgets. And a stock number that is wrong somewhere, discovered when a customer buys online something that sold in-store an hour earlier.

Nobody chose this. It happens because the website was bought first, or the till was, and by the time the second arrived the first was too embedded to replace.

Two channels, not two systems

Rutba Commerce treats web and counter as two channels of one business. There is one product catalog, one price list, and one stock truth behind both — that last one held by Rutba Inventory, which is why Commerce requires it rather than shipping its own stock module.

• Storefront — product pages, cart and checkout, driven by the shared catalog.
• CMS — pages, content and landing pages for the storefront, so a shop does not need a second website tool bolted alongside.
• Point of Sale — the counter till: scan, sell, take payment, print, with stock deducted live.

The test of whether this is real is boring and specific: change a price once, and check the till. If it took effect in both places without a sync job, the catalog is shared. If it took fifteen minutes, it is not.

Why the CMS is in the box

This is the part people ask about. A storefront needs pages that are not products — an about page, a delivery policy, a landing page for a campaign — and the usual answer is a separate website on separate software, linked from the shop.

That arrangement is where the second product list is born. Somebody builds a landing page listing six products, hard-codes the prices into the copy, and the page is wrong the next time anything changes. Content that lives beside the catalog can reference it instead of restating it.

Every duplicated product list starts as a landing page somebody wrote in a hurry.

What happens after the sale

Orders from every channel land in one queue. Whether that queue is enough depends on the business: if you pick, pack and run your own deliveries, Rutba Orders is the product that does the rest — and because a storefront order and a counter order are the same kind of order, it does not need to know which channel produced it.