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Stock item Fulfilment tab showing the Bin Location and Buffer time cards

Inventory > Stock Items > [Item] > Fulfilment

Open in TWICE Admin

inventory/stock-items
The Fulfilment tab on a stock item holds two settings that have nothing to do with each other except that both matter at the moment an item is handed over. Buffer time keeps a gap around each booking, so a wetsuit gets rinsed and a bike gets serviced before it goes out again. Bin location is a free-text label — Rack A-3, Shelf 12 — that tells whoever is picking the order where the unit physically lives. Buffer time is the one worth understanding properly. It does less than most people assume, and the section below explains what it does not cover.

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Prerequisites

Required permissions:
  • inventory:stock_item_fulfilment:manage — buffer time and bin location on a stock item
  • inventory:sku_general:manage — the same fields on a SKU, where they act as the default
  • catalog:listing_limits:manage — the listing’s Limits tab, which you will need for the storefront half
All four system roles hold all three.
Before you start, decide:
  • SKU default or item override? Buffer time set on the SKU applies to every linked item that has not overridden it. Set it on the SKU unless one particular unit needs longer.
  • Before, after, or both. They are separate settings and they mean different things.
  • Whether customers must be stopped from booking too soon. If so, buffer time is not enough on its own — see below.

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What buffer time actually does

Buffer time has two halves, set independently: Both are entered as an amount plus a unit — minutes, hours, days, and so on. The engine applies them by padding every existing booking. A new booking conflicts with an existing one if it would land inside that padding, and the gap between two consecutive bookings on the same unit has to hold the earlier one’s trailing pad plus the later one’s leading pad — they do not overlap or double-count. This part works on the storefront. The availability your customers see already accounts for buffers around existing bookings, so a slot too close to another booking is not offered.

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What buffer time does not do

Buffer time does not stop a customer from booking a start that is too soon from now.A one-hour “before each booking” buffer does not remove the next hour from the storefront’s selectable times. The customer can pick a start ten minutes away, and the calendar will show it as valid. The booking is then rejected — either when the selection is validated, or at checkout, where the pay button stays disabled.
This is not a bug in the calendar. The two cases are genuinely different:
  • Buffer against an existing booking is a property of that booking, so it can be drawn on the calendar in advance.
  • Buffer as lead time from now is a moving target measured against the current moment. TWICE deliberately does not fold it into the item’s stored availability, so nothing in the rendered calendar marks those starts as unbookable. It is only checked when a selection is validated and again when the order is created.
The result is the shape merchants report: a time that looks bookable, a customer who picks it, and a failure at the end of the flow rather than the start.

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The fix: pair it with the listing’s order deadline

The storefront-side control lives on the listing, not the stock item. Open the listing, go to its Limits tab, and set Orders must be placed at latest. Unlike buffer time, the order deadline is compiled into the availability the storefront renders: a booking cannot start inside the deadline window, so those times stop being offered in the first place.
Set the order deadline to at least your longest “before each booking” buffer for that item. The buffer keeps your operation honest; the order deadline is what the customer’s calendar obeys.
The listing’s Limits tab carries three more rules that shape what the storefront offers, all of them worth setting deliberately alongside a buffer:
Listing Limits tab showing minimum and maximum booking duration, increment, and order deadline

Catalog > Listings > [Listing] > Limits

Read more: Listing Limits covers each one in full, including the order deadline’s two modes — a fixed offset before the start, or a wall-clock cutoff on an earlier day.
Testing this in the admin will not reproduce it. The lead-time check applies only to anonymous storefront shoppers. Staff, API keys, and signed-in tokens are exempt by design, so an order you create yourself in the admin will go through on a start time a customer would be refused. Test it on the storefront, in a private window.

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The Walkthrough

1

Decide where the buffer belongs

Open Inventory > SKUs, pick the SKU, and use its Fulfilment tab if the buffer is a property of the product — most cases. Use an individual item’s Fulfilment tab only when one unit genuinely differs.
2

Set the buffer

In the Buffer time card, set Before each booking and After each booking.On a stock item linked to a SKU, the pickers start disabled and show the inherited SKU values. Choose to override to edit them, or Use the SKU default to go back to inheriting. An inherited value is marked Inherited from SKU.
3

Clear any bookings the new buffer would not fit

Widening a buffer can overlap bookings that are already on the calendar. TWICE checks before saving and, if it finds any, opens a dialog headed Increasing buffer time would overlap booking, listing each one with a View order link.Choose Save anyway to apply the new buffer while leaving those bookings on their current buffer — each is marked This booking keeps its current buffer time — or cancel and adjust the dates first.
4

Set the bin location

In the Bin Location card on the same tab, type where the unit is kept. It is free text, so pick a scheme and stick to it — A-3, Rack A-3 and rack a3 are three different labels to anyone reading a pick list.Bin location follows the same SKU inheritance: set it on the SKU when a whole product lives in one place, and override it on the item when a unit does not.
5

Set the matching listing limits

If customers book this item online, open the listing in Catalog > Listings, go to Limits, and set Orders must be placed at latest to cover your preparation buffer. Review the duration limits while you are there.

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How do I know it worked?

Buffer time: open the item’s Events tab and look at the timeline around an existing booking — the padded window shows either side of it. Then check the storefront: dates immediately after that booking should no longer be selectable. Order deadline: on the storefront, try to select a start inside the deadline window. It should not be offered at all. If it is offered and only fails later, the deadline is not set on that listing — the buffer alone cannot do this. Bin location: open an order that has the item assigned and open its stock item drawer. A Storage location section appears with a BIN chip carrying your label. The section is hidden entirely when no bin location is set.

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Troubleshooting / Common Pitfalls

Cause: the item’s preparation buffer was the only rule in place. It rejects a too-soon start but does not remove it from the calendar.What to do: set Orders must be placed at latest on the listing’s Limits tab, at least as long as the buffer. That is the setting the storefront calendar obeys.
Cause: the lead-time check runs only for anonymous public storefront requests. Staff sessions, API keys and tokens skip it deliberately, so that a member of staff can always take a last-minute booking over the counter.What to do: reproduce it on the public storefront in a private window, not in the admin.
Cause: the item is still inheriting from its SKU, or you set it on the SKU while the item carries its own override. An item-level value always wins.What to do: check the card for Inherited from SKU. Use Use the SKU default to drop an override and let the SKU govern.
When this happens: the new buffer will not fit around bookings already on the calendar.What to do: Save anyway applies the buffer going forward and leaves those bookings on their existing buffer, which is usually what you want. Use View order on each to check them if the turnaround genuinely cannot be met, and move the dates instead.
Cause: buffer time is excluded from bulk editing — the card reads Buffer time cannot be edited for multiple items.What to do: set it on the shared SKU, which reaches every linked item at once.Read more: How to bulk-edit stock items
When this happens: bin location shows on the order’s stock item drawer, and it can be placed on printed documents through a document template. It is not a column in the Stock Items table, so you cannot filter or sort by it.What to do: if you need to work through stock by storage area, use an attribute instead — attributes do become filterable, sortable columns.

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Next Steps

Listing limits

The storefront half: durations, increments, and the order deadline.

Availability

Every layer that decides whether a slot can be booked.

Reserve a stock item

Blocking a window outright, rather than padding one.

Stock item fulfilment

What else the Fulfilment tab carries.