Selling in four places, counting stock in one spreadsheet.
Every channel keeps its own idea of what is available, so the same unit is on sale three times. The buffer you add to prevent overselling is stock you have chosen not to sell, and it is the cheapest inventory you will ever waste.
What changes for retail and online sellers
- One stock number every channel agrees with
- The nightly reconciliation hour handed back
- Overselling and its marketplace penalties stopped at the source
- Returns costed and restocked as a tracked process
What goes wrong in retail and online sellers
The counter system, the website and each marketplace all hold a stock number, and none of them tells the others when it changes. So the same unit sells twice, the cancellation costs a marketplace metric that is genuinely expensive to repair, and the fix everyone reaches for is a manual buffer that leaves good stock unsold on purpose.
Underneath that is an hour a day of reconciliation. Somebody exports orders from each channel, lines them up in a spreadsheet, and finds the ones that fell through. It is the most boring hour in the business, it is where missed orders live, and it scales linearly with every channel you add.
What this usually runs on today
- Counter billing or POS software
- A website store plus one or two marketplaces
- Stock counted in a spreadsheet
- Courier panels handled separately per shipment
- Nightly CSV exports reconciled by hand
Recognise most of that list? It is the usual starting point.
What we build for retail and online sellers
The pieces specific to this pairing. Each is quoted separately, so you can start with one and see whether it earned its cost before committing to the next.
- 01
One stock position, pushed everywhere
A single source of truth for availability that updates each channel as it changes. The buffer comes off, because the same unit can no longer be sold twice.
- 02
Every channel's orders in one queue
Orders land in one place to be picked, packed, labelled and tracked, whichever channel they came from. Courier status flows back automatically, so where is my order stops being a lookup in a separate panel.
- 03
Reconciliation that happens continuously
Channel payouts, fees and orders matched as they arrive rather than in a nightly export. The hour comes back, and the orders that used to fall between channels surface immediately instead of on a spreadsheet.
- 04
Returns as a real process
A return logged, inspected, restocked or written off, and refunded, with the cost attributed to the right product and channel. Most sellers cannot say what returns actually cost them, and the answer changes purchasing decisions.
- 05
Sane behaviour when a channel misbehaves
Marketplace APIs rate-limit and go down. Updates queue and retry, and anything undeliverable raises itself to a person, because a stock sync that fails silently is worse than none at all.
Questions we get asked about this
Why not use one of the off-the-shelf listing tools?
If you sell simple units on two mainstream marketplaces, one of those tools is probably right and cheaper than anything we would build. The case for bespoke integration is a channel they do not support, a counter system with no standard connector, or stock that is not a simple unit — kits, weights, batches with expiry.
Which system should own stock?
Usually whichever one the physical stock is counted against — most often the counter or warehouse system, because that is where a human touches the goods. What matters far more than the choice is that it is made explicitly. Most multichannel pain is two systems both believing they are authoritative.
How fast does availability actually update?
Near real time where a channel supports webhooks and push updates, and on a short poll where it does not — some marketplaces simply will not accept updates faster than a set rate. We will tell you the honest interval per channel up front, because an oversell every hundred orders is a different business decision from one every thousand.
Want to know what this would involve for your business?
Forty-five minutes on how your operation actually runs, then a written summary of what we would fix first. Free, and yours to keep.