In the constantly evolving environment of e-commerce, one challenge stands out as a potential issue for sellers: managing accurate and synchronised inventory levels across multiple channels. When you are managing several marketplaces (Shopee, Lazada, TikTok Shop, Zalora and more), this hurdle can lead to significant disadvantages.
Inventory synchronisation is the process of ensuring that a product's available stock levels are consistently and accurately updated across all of the channels that a seller uses. This includes online marketplaces, websites, physical storefronts, and any other platforms that feature things for sale.
For e-commerce sellers who manage multiple platforms, keeping inventory in sync is a daily struggle. Manual updates, human errors, and the lack of real-time synchronisation can cause a series of issues, eventually impacting customer satisfaction. Selling too much, where things are offered beyond available stock, and underselling, where customers are facing delays or cancellations, can ruin a seller's reputation and harm customer trust.
In this blog, we will look at the various problems caused by inventory synchronisation issues. Here are some of the major challenges associated with maintaining synchronised inventory levels across many platforms:
The drawbacks: The cost of inventory synchronization issues
Overselling
In e-commerce, overselling happens when a seller offers more products for sale than they actually have in stock. Imagine a shop advertising 100 items, but they only have 50 available. When customers buy the product, it creates issues like delayed delivery, cancellations, and unhappy customers.
This occurs when there is a time lag between the sale on one platform and the manual update of inventory across others. As a result, customers may place orders for products that are no longer in stock. Overselling could lead you to cancel orders or request customers to cancel, causing those who encounter stock-out situations to turn to competitors. This may result in a decline in customer retention and a loss of sales.
Underselling
On the other hand, underselling can occur when inventory is not updated quickly to reflect newly available products. As a consequence, potential customers are unaware of product availability, which leads to missed sales opportunities and income loss.
Customer dissatisfaction:
Customer frustration is the most obvious and visible result of inventory synchronisation issues. Overselling can result in unfulfilled orders, delayed shipments, or even cancellations, leaving customers frustrated and dissatisfied with their shopping experience. As a consequence, customers may leave negative reviews for the store, potentially harming your brand reputation.
Reputation damage
Negative experiences for customers often result in poor reviews, harming the seller's reputation. In e-commerce, a tarnished reputation can have long-term consequences, discouraging potential customers and limiting overall business growth.
Higher refund
Inaccurate inventory levels contribute to higher refund, as customers receive experience delays. As a result sellers tend to lose selling opportunities especially during peak campaigns. Consequently, the majority of customers opt to request a refund. This can directly impact cash flow. Handling refunds becomes a difficult and time-consuming process that reduces operational effectiveness.
Marketplace penalties
Some marketplaces, such as Shopee and Lazada, have strict guidelines regarding inventory accuracy. Sellers who repeatedly deal with synchronisation and cancellation issues may suffer penalties and be limited in their ability to access certain marketplace features and benefits risking their business's visibility.
Are these drawbacks familiar to you? If yes, this is where Sellercraft comes in to address the challenges of maintaining accurate and synchronized inventory levels across multiple marketplaces.
The solution: How a smart and automation for synchronization can help your store in improving better inventory management
Real time synchronization of your products updates
With Sellercraft OMS, you can efficiently manage your multichannel inventory on one platform. This means you no longer have to open multiple tabs when updating the stock of the same product.
This smart tool synchronizes data, including products, content, prices, and stock, by connecting all your e-commerce stores to Sellercraft. It supports platforms such as TikTok Shop, Lazada, Shopee, Zalora, Shopify, WooCommerce, Magento, and many more! Sellercraft makes it easier for sellers to responsibly manage their stock. Say goodbye to manual updates and the risk of overselling or underselling.
Improve data accuracy
Data entry problems caused by humans are no longer an issue. Sellercraft's automation reduces the chance of mistakes in product descriptions and stock levels. As a result, data accuracy across the platforms positively increases. Furthermore, it improves your team’s productivity by reducing inefficient workflows. Sellercraft provides you with a better way to ensure data accuracy, avoiding the time-consuming manual updates of stocks in different tabs.
Simplify order processing
Say goodbye to the days of tiresome order processing. Sellercraft automates the entire order fulfilment process, allowing you to efficiently manage orders from multiple channels on a single centralised platform.
Thorough analytics
On top of that, Sellercraft’s Data and Analytics also provides you with clear visibility on inventory forecasts and a complete understanding of metrics for performance. It is able to give you a stock alert on low stock, zero stock and demand products. You can manage to restocking or avoid losing on potential sales items. As a result, you can make informed decisions, optimise strategies, and watch your business grow. Consequently, your e-commerce performance improves in selling opportunities and improve the shops’ reputations.
Conclusion
In the fast-paced world of e-commerce, sellers cannot overlook the value of managing multichannel inventory synchronisation. Problems such as human error, manual updates, and poor synchronisation may harm a seller's image and the success of their business as a whole.
Selling beyond or below your actual inventory levels is problematic as it not only leads to customer dissatisfaction but can also result in tangible consequences, such as increased refund requests, and potential fines imposed by the marketplace
Realizing the importance of addressing these issues promptly, Sellercraft emerges as a solution to overcome the challenges of multichannel inventory management. Sellercraft minimizes the risks associated with these problems by offering real-time synchronization and automated processes. E-commerce sellers can bid farewell to the challenges of managing product updates across their multichannels.
