Inventory management for ecommerce, across channels

The short answer

• Every channel keeps its own count — the store, the marketplace, the phone, the portal — and copies drift; that drift is the oversell.
• The fix is a leading record: one live inventory that channels publish from and sell into.
• The operations behind the sale — receiving, picking, purchasing, wholesale — must write to the same record.
• BSimple imports Shopify orders via webhooks and runs that record, from $180/month (AUD).

Why multi-channel oversells — and what stops it

Each sales channel holds its own number: the online store thinks nine, the marketplace thinks eight, last night's phone order took one from both. Synchronising the copies helps and never fully works — sync has latency, latency has collisions, and the collision is the apology email. The structural fix is refusing to keep copies: one live record holds the truth; channels publish availability from it; every sale writes back into it before the next promise is counted.

Then the channel-external stock movements stop being invisible: the supplier delivery received at 7am updates the record the store reads from; the wholesale order through the trade portal reserves units the store can no longer sell; the cycle count corrects every channel at once. Overselling becomes structural impossibility rather than a vigilance contest. The ecommerce-website guide covers the store-plus-website pattern specifically.

The operations the storefront never sees

Ecommerce inventory is mostly behind the store: goods received against purchase orders; picking and packing with delivery slips; returns entering the record as ordinary movements; batch and lot detail where provenance matters; stocktakes that keep the number honest without closing the warehouse; purchasing signals that raise a purchase order when a bestseller dips across all channels combined. A system that only syncs the storefront misses the majority of the stock's life.

BSimple runs the whole record for small-to-medium product businesses: multi-location live stock, Shopify order import via webhooks with pick and pack and approval, trade customers ordering through their own portal at their own pricing, purchasing from demand, batch traceability, and the accounting boundary — online invoicing stays between Shopify and Xero, wholesale invoicing hands off from BSimple — so no channel is double-counted. From $180/month (AUD) with the free trial. The boundary, plainly: BSimple is not a storefront; it is the record behind one. The inventory management overview shows the whole record.