If you sell the same product on your own site and two marketplaces, you have one question: where is stock kept? If the answer isn’t clear, you spend the end of the month dealing with cancelled orders.
The single-source rule
Stock lives in one place and the other channels are fed from it. Usually that place is the ERP or your own system; typing stock by hand into a marketplace panel breaks the system on day one.
How often to sync
- Stock: live if possible, otherwise every five minutes
- Price: hourly is enough, more often during campaigns
- Orders: pulled instantly, otherwise shipping time burns
- Returns and cancellations: checked at least twice a day
The classic mistakes
The most common one is having no concept of reserved stock: stock isn’t reduced when the order arrives, a bulk update runs at night, and in that gap a second customer buys the same item. The second is not returning refunded goods to stock; the third is mismatched variants.
What to watch for
- The same product code (SKU) must be used in every channel
- There must be a rule that closes a channel at a critical stock level
- Error logs must be kept; a sync that fails silently is the most dangerous kind
- There must be a separate field for campaign prices; the base price must not be overwritten
An integration is judged not by the times it works, but by what it does when it fails.
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