About Inventory Partitioning

Inventory Partitioning controls how the available stock in a warehouse is split among the stores that share it. Without a partitioning strategy, DropStream pushes the warehouse’s available quantity to every store that lists a SKU. With a strategy in place, that quantity is reduced or divided according to rules you configure before it goes out.

Open the feature from Automation → Inventory Partitioning in the left sidebar.

When to use a partitioning strategy

The standard inventory flow (About Inventory) pushes the warehouse’s full available quantity to each store. That works when one store is the only consumer of a warehouse, or when overselling between stores is unlikely.

Use a partitioning strategy when:

• Multiple stores share one warehouse and you want to hold back safety stock to absorb timing gaps between an order on one channel and the inventory update on another.
• You want to ration stock across stores by allocating fixed quantities or proportional shares, instead of broadcasting the full availability to every channel.
• One channel should get priority for limited stock — fill the highest-priority store first, then any leftover to the next.

A strategy is configured per merchant + warehouse pair. Every store on that warehouse uses the strategy. You can run at most one active strategy per pair.

How a strategy fits into the flow

A strategy sits between the warehouse pull and the channel push:

Warehouse → DropStream → strategy → Channel

On every Smart Sync or Full Sync:

1. DropStream pulls the current available figure for each SKU from the warehouse.
2. The active strategy (if any) transforms that figure into a per-store quantity.
3. DropStream pushes the per-store quantity to each store using its listing (or the warehouse SKU as-is if no listing exists).

If no strategy is active for the merchant + warehouse, step 2 is skipped and every store receives the same warehouse quantity.

Strategy types

DropStream supports one strategy type today, with more in development:

The list view

The Partitioning Strategies list groups strategies by merchant. Each row shows the warehouse, strategy type, summary of its configuration, count of stores receiving inventory from it, status (Active/Inactive), and the date it was activated.

Filter the list by Strategy Type, Active/Inactive, Warehouse, or Merchant using the Filter by menu. Search by warehouse name in the search box.

Each row has a kebab menu with View Details, Edit Strategy, Deactivate, and Delete.

Strategy lifecycle

A strategy moves through a small set of states:

• Active — the strategy is in effect; the next inventory sync uses it.
• Inactive — the strategy exists but is not being applied. The warehouse’s full quantity is pushed to each store, as if no strategy existed.

A strategy is created and immediately activated. Use Deactivate from the detail page or the list-row kebab menu to pause it. Reactivate later from the same place. Delete removes it entirely; you’d need to recreate it to bring it back.

The detail page

Click a strategy in the list (or View Details from the kebab menu) to open the detail page.

• Connected Stores — every store on the strategy’s warehouse, with platform tag. Click a store to jump to its rows in Channel Inventory.
• Execution Statistics — SKUs partitioned, stores receiving, partitions run today and this week, last partition timestamp.
• Strategy Configuration — the chosen type, merchant, warehouse, status, plus the per-type configuration (for Safety Stock: Buffer Type, Buffer %, Distribution, Minimum Distributable).
• Dates — created, last updated, last activated.

Use Edit in the page header to change the configuration, or Deactivate to pause it.

What to read next

• Safety Stock strategy — the only strategy type available today, including how the buffer and distribution math works in practice.
• Limit inventory updates per store — when a partitioning strategy is the right tool vs simply removing a listing.