Inventory Holds and Blocking Issues

During fulfillment, each reservation ties up inventory for the items in that order. This guide explains when inventory is held, what happens when a payment fails, and the common issues that can block an order from moving forward.

How Inventory Holds Work

When a reservation is created and items are assigned, inventory for those items is held — meaning those bottles are reserved for that member and are not available for other orders. This hold persists through every active status:

Pending, Pending Choice, Confirmed, Charged, Ready, Awaiting Shipment, Partial Pickup — all of these tie up inventory until the reservation is either fulfilled or cancelled.

Inventory is released (returned to available stock) only when a reservation reaches one of these terminal states:

Fulfilled — the order is complete, inventory has been delivered
Cancelled — the reservation was cancelled (including when an order is relocated to another location and re-created there), items return to stock
Released — the reservation was released as its release cycle wrapped up, items return to stock
Skipped — the member opted out, no inventory was consumed

Past-Due (Failed Charge) Reservations

A failed charge does not release inventory, and it does not change the order's status. The order stays Confirmed and keeps its hold — WineView does not auto-release stock on a failed charge because most failures resolve on retry, and releasing stock prematurely would force you to re-allocate from a different bottle if the retry succeeds.

When the charge fails, two things happen automatically:

An outstanding balance is recorded against the member.
The membership is paused until that balance is paid or waived. (For releases, the member's not-yet-charged reservations on other open releases are cancelled as part of the pause.)

How to Free Up Held Inventory

Collect or retry the balance — If the retry succeeds (automatically or when you collect the outstanding balance), the order proceeds to Charged and stays held until fulfilled.
Waive the balance — Clearing the outstanding balance resolves the past-due state and lifts the auto-pause.
Cancel the reservation — From the member's fulfillment sidebar, cancel manually. This releases the held inventory back to available stock.
Cancel the membership — Cancelling the underlying membership releases all its open (not-yet-paid) reservations.

For more on outstanding balances, the auto-pause, and retry options, see Failed Payments and Retries.

Blocking Issues

Some reservations can't move forward until a problem is resolved. WineView calls these blocking issues and surfaces them on the Needs Attention filter pill in the fulfillment stats bar.

Common Blocking Issues

Issue	What It Means	How to Resolve
Shipping state not allowed	The member's shipping address is in a state your business doesn't ship to	Update the member's address, or configure the state on Shipping → States
No address or incomplete address	The member needs a valid shipping address	Contact the member to collect their address, or update it in the member sidebar
Missing date of birth	The shipping provider (VinoShipper) requires the recipient's date of birth for compliance	Add the member's date of birth. Note: this blocks shipping-label generation, not charging
No payment method	No card on file for this member	Send a card collection link or ask the member to add a card
Not yet charged	A scheduled charge is overdue	Trigger the charge manually or investigate why it didn't run
Charge failed	A previous charge attempt failed (the order is now past due — see above)	Retry the charge or wait for automatic retry — see Failed Payments and Retries

Open the member sidebar to see the specific issue and the recommended fix for that order.

A note on templates: "No matching template" is not one of the per-order blocking issues above. Template coverage gaps (a tier/fulfillment-method combination with no assigned template) are caught earlier — at the preflight check when you open a release, and again by the periodic reconcile job that re-provisions orders left stranded. Fix them by assigning templates in Change Templates rather than from a single order's sidebar.