Till & shop floor
Fair mode: sell offline, keep stock accurate
3 min
At a record fair you sell from a cash box and a card reader, and afterwards your stock is wrong for a week: what went over the table at the fair is still for sale online at home. Fair mode fixes that in four steps. It is part of the Shop plan because it is the same movement as the till: scanning something on a busy moment and booking it off without sitting behind a screen.
1. Before you leave: select the crates
In the Hub, mark what goes with you. Per crate, if you organise your stock in crates, or per copy. A crate is a group of copies with a location, so selecting a crate is one click for a hundred records.
2. Temporarily offline on every channel
Switch fair mode on for that selection. The Hub withdraws those copies from your webshop, Discogs, Bol.com and eBay for as long as the fair lasts. Nobody can buy them online while they lie in a crate two hundred kilometres from your shop. The rest of your stock stays online and keeps selling.
This is the actual promise
Step 2 is the point. The problem with fairs is not the bookkeeping afterwards; it is the record that sells on Discogs on Saturday afternoon while it is already in a buyer's bag at the fair. Offline means offline everywhere.
3. At the fair: mark what sold
Scan the label or the barcode of each record you sell, or tick it off in the list, on your phone. This works with poor reception too: the app keeps the sales and sends them as soon as it has a connection. If you take card payments with a reader connected to your till system, the till sale reaches the Hub the usual way and you do not need to tick anything.
4. Afterwards: the rest goes back online
Switch fair mode off. Everything you did not sell is republished on every channel, automatically, the same evening. Everything you did sell is booked off and stays off. Your stock is right the next morning instead of after a week of counting.
Prices at the fair
Fair mode does not change prices. The label on the sleeve shows the number; what you charge is up to you. If you sell a lot below the online price, the sale is still booked correctly, because the Hub only needs to know that the copy is gone.
Records you buy at the fair
Fairs are where you buy too. Scan and Go works on the spot: scan or photograph what you bought and it lands in your working stock in the Hub, to be priced and published when you are back. Nothing needs to be remembered.
What fair mode is not
It is not a way to close your webshop. For a holiday you pause the whole shop from your dashboard; fair mode takes specific copies offline while the rest keeps selling. And it is not a second inventory: the crates at the fair and the shelves at home are the same stock in the same Hub, which is the whole reason the count is right afterwards.
Reserve and collect
The same mechanism handles a customer who calls to reserve a record for pickup: block the copy in the Hub, it disappears online, and it comes back if the customer never shows up.