As your product count grows, tracking products and stock becomes the most time-consuming part of e-commerce. A product's price says one thing on the site and another on the marketplace; the last item sold in your shop also sells online, and you have to cancel the order. Most of these problems come from the same source: product information and stock quantities being kept by hand in more than one place. Below, we explain step by step how to set this up properly.
Bulk product uploads start with a tidy spreadsheet
Entering hundreds of products one by one takes time and creates errors. Instead, products are prepared in a spreadsheet and uploaded to the site in bulk. Each row of the spreadsheet holds the product code (stock code, or SKU), product name, category, description, price, VAT rate, stock quantity, barcode if there is one, and image file names. The most important field is the product code. If you give each product and each option a single code that never changes, you can also make later price and stock updates with the same spreadsheet. Keep attributes such as material, dimensions or compatible model in separate columns; these fields are used as filters on the site and help customers find the product they are looking for faster. If you are moving from another system, the products and images can be moved from there; after the move, the prices and stock of a group of products need to be checked by hand.
Options such as size and color are tracked with separate stock
A T-shirt with size and color options is a single product in the customer's eyes, but in the warehouse every size and color combination is a separate item. These options are called variants, and each variant has its own stock quantity, its own code and, if needed, its own price and image. If variants are not set up correctly, "red, size M" keeps selling on the site even after it has run out. In a well-built system, when the customer picks a color, that color's photo opens and a size that has sold out cannot be selected. Preparing a separate image for each color also reduces "wrong color arrived" complaints. Prices that change by variant, such as a larger size costing more, should also be defined at the variant level, not at the product level. Write variant names consistently too: if one product says "Grey" and another says "gray", both the filters on your site and your sales reports break.
If you sell on more than one channel, manage stock from one place
If your physical shop, your website and one or more marketplaces share the same shelf, stock should be managed from a single main source. This source is usually the e-commerce site's admin panel or the ERP (enterprise resource planning) or accounting software you use. When there is a sale on one channel, the stock goes down in the main source and is passed on to the other channels; this is called stock syncing. Sales at the shop's till also need to be recorded in the same system, or a product that has run out on the shelf will keep selling online. Because sales speed up during campaigns and discount periods, watch syncing more closely at those times. Two more points need attention. The less often syncing runs, the higher the chance that the same last item sells on two channels at once. And stock should only be changed in the main source; a quantity corrected by hand in the marketplace panel is replaced by the main source's quantity at the next sync.
Ways to avoid selling products you do not have in stock
- Safety stock: for fast-selling products, closing the last few units to online sales leaves room for sync delays and counting errors. Rather than keeping this buffer the same for every product, set it according to how fast each product sells.
- Automatic out-of-stock label: when stock reaches zero, the product or variant should be closed to sales. Keeping the product page live instead of deleting it lets customers leave a "notify me when it is back" request and keeps the page's place in search engines.
- Pre-orders and supply time: for products made to order or coming from a supplier, the delivery time is shown instead of a stock quantity; the customer knows from the start what they will get and when.
- Regular counts: the quantity in the system and the quantity on the shelf drift apart over time. Count at regular intervals and correct the differences in the main source.
Before you start, write down the answers to these questions: How many products and how many variants do you have? Does each product have a single code? Where is stock kept today: in an Excel spreadsheet or in accounting software? Which channels do you sell on, or plan to sell on? These answers decide which system will be the main source. Also decide who is responsible: if it is not clear who updates stock and prices and how often, even the best-built system falls apart over time. Adorb's custom e-commerce software comes with product and variant management built in; we also set up marketplace and ERP or accounting connections the way your business needs.