How to Synchronize Stock Across Different Shopping Platforms
eCommerce is not just about buying and selling products online. It also entails the different operations e-retailers carry out to run their business. One of those tedious tasks is to synchronize stock across the various shopping platforms they are using to sell their products.
E-retailers need to manage their inventory and update stock when required on all the shopping platforms to keep customers coming. Software like inventory management, multichannel systems, and ERP help e-retailers manage their inventory. However, these software need access to data on different shopping platforms to synchronize stock and help the store owners keep their inventory up-to-date.
Such functionality can be achieved by developing an integration between shopping platforms and eCommerce software to access data from the online stores and sync it across all the platforms. Let’s see the process in detail.
Stock Synchronization in eCommerce
Stock synchronization is the process of keeping the inventory of a retail business up-to-date on all the sales channels in real-time. So, for example, if a product is sold out, it should show the same status on all the channels until the store owners have it back in their warehouse.
To synchronize stock on all the channels, the store owners manually enter the product quantity in the listings and link everything with them on all the platforms.
When a customer orders a product from a marketplace or a platform like Amazon or Shopify, the order data gets updated automatically by software like inventory management or order management.
When the inventory is adjusted, all the listings across the sales channels are updated automatically. In this way, retail owners can synchronize stock in eCommerce.
The following systems allow the e-store owners to perform stock synchronization:
- Inventory management software — It keeps track of all the items that are sold out in the store and updates the stock accordingly. The retailers don’t have to worry about inconsistent stock levels on different shopping platforms.
- ERP software — It allows store owners to synchronize stock by updating inventory count just after an item is purchased.
- Warehouse management systems — They monitor and control inventory across all the sales channels. They update the inventory on all the channels automatically as soon as it gets updated in the current quantity.
- Multi-channel system — Using multi-channel systems, the merchants can keep their stock updated without overselling or underselling products.
Data Required for Stock Synchronization Performing
To synchronize stock across multiple shopping platforms, the one thing that all the eCommerce software need is access to data from the online stores. The stores have data related to products and orders placed by the customers, which allows the software to update the inventory across multiple platforms.
Without access to such data, the store owners would not perform stock synchronization as the software will have nothing to provide their functionality to the retailers. In addition, all the software requires product and order data to calculate inventory, sync it across all the platforms, and update the actual numbers.
The ability to access product and order data from shopping platforms requires the development of integration between those platforms and eCommerce software. When solutions like inventory management, WMS, order management, ERP, and multi-channel integrate with shopping platforms like Shopify, Magento, etc., they can retrieve all the details regarding products and orders from the stores built on them.
The connection is established between the APIs of both the software and the shopping platform. The latter allows developers and software vendors to connect and manage online store data efficiently.
The software vendors can’t propose their solutions to the e-retailers without access to product and order data from the shopping platforms. This is because if the software doesn’t retrieve the necessary data, it cannot provide its designated functions to the store owners, and hence, would not be of any use to them.
How to Access and Modify Order and Product Data from Shopping Platforms
The easiest way to access and modify order and product data from multiple shopping platforms to synchronize stock is API2Cart.
API2Cart is a unified API that allows software providers to integrate their solutions with more than 40 shopping platforms and marketplaces at once. That is, the vendors can connect their software with multiple shopping platforms without having to establish separate connections with each of them.
All you need is to connect your software with an API2Cart. Once the connection is established, API2Cart integrates your software to all the supported platforms in one go.
Moreover, API2Cart also provides several API methods to retrieve product and order data to synchronize stock on multiple shopping platforms.
- webhook for order.add event — Webhooks allow to receive notifications about any changes that occur on the shopping platform. For the order.add event, the webhook sends a notification every time an order is placed on the platform.
- order.list — With this method, you can easily extract a list of orders from the online stores of the shopping platforms. By default, this method returns four orders.
- product.update — With this method, the software can update the price and quantity for any product on the online stores.
Using these methods, the software can easily retrieve the required data from online stores on the shopping platforms and allow retailers to synchronize stock across all the platforms automatically.
It is possible to try API2Cart functionality easily for a month for free. More detailed info you can find on the company’s website.
