Overselling in the marketplace can be caused by two major issues
- Marketplace Restriction: This is when the marketplace applies different restrictions like stock update, adding new products, etc.
- Stock Reservation: This is when the marketplace holds product quantity onto itself.
Overselling can be prevented by following the two best practices.
A major reason for overselling could be due to the difference in SKUs in your marketplace account vs your OMS/WMS account.
We recommend following these best practices to avoid confusion and overselling.
List SKUs in OMS: When you list an SKU through OMS it gets automatically linked to marketplace and WMS. This provides a smooth transition of the products.
Product and Stock Sync: If you are not listing the products from OMS, you need to perform product sync as a mandatory step in OMS for the required marketplace. However, changing the SKU of the existing products in the marketplace is not recommended, as OMS will consider the new SKU as a new product, thereby creating duplication in terms of marketplace code/product ID.
Standard CSKU and ISKU: As a best practice, maintain same SKU codes across marketplaces. Please ensure your CSKU and ISKU are mapped correctly incase you are having different inventory SKUs for warehouse products.
Maintain Unique SKUs: Please ensure that all the SKUs across group, variant and single products are unique to ensure seamless syncing of products, inventory and orders across platforms.
We recommend adding/modifying SKUs through OMS only
The flash sale feature in OMS will help you allocate stocks to specific marketplaces before the Sale Event. The quantity assigned to a specific marketplace will thus not be available on the other channels. This prevents the mixing of stock and overselling during a sale event.
There are two types of Flashsale that you can create:
Stock Allocation: This is the dedicated allotment of stocks to a particular marketplace from which the stocks are not shared with any other connected marketplaces until the promotion is live.
Stock Reservation: This Flashsale promotion reserves the stock for a specific marketplace and the unreserved stocks get allocated to the remaining marketplaces. However, the marketplace for which the stocks are reserved will be able to use the overall stocks (in case if the stocks are still available).
We have a detailed article on how to create Flashsale. You can refer to it Here.
We recommend that in addition to following these best practices, you should keep some stock as Buffer
If you are still confused about SKU Standardisation and Flashsale, you can also refer to the following video.