I know this is dated.. but since I have lived the "inventory control" life for a major company, to keep an inventory of available fish comes down to how bad they want to... No disrespect to the previous posters and yes I agree there is also an error rate for any inventory, but there is no way that a company like Preuss or the like just orders a line item "fish" and sells line item "fish". Each species has to be orded specifically by a stock number and recorded for business purposes upon receipt and sale. Anyway, my point is that if there is a decent inventory system (that is a requirement for any business) and being that the livestock is a major part of their "assets" or "inventory", it would simply require an interface from their sales info to their inventory. Then post the inventory to their site. The only additonal work would be to overlay an exel file onto their website at the end of the evening, and of course add incoming fish.. which my guess is they have to now. I think their is definitely a way this can be done.. the question is can you convince a LFS that handling several calls a day about what's in their tanks is more or less a waste of time then tracking and posting their inventory. If the registers are PC based then I would say the infrastructure is there.. they just need the justification to tap into it.
-Marc