What is stock sync?

Syncing stock from SKULabs warehouses onto to your sales channels. Keywords: enable, activate, turn on, stock, inventory, synchronization

Updated over a week ago

What is stock sync?

Stock sync is an opt-in feature which allows SKULabs to act as your master of inventory.

When enabled, SKULabs will push stock quantities to your sales channels and overwrite the quantities on those channels. This is strictly an outbound only sync from SKULabs to your channels. You should always be making changes to stock levels within SKULabs itself. Any stock changes made directly on the sales channel itself will be overwritten on the channel by SKULabs the next time stock sync runs.

Your account must be completely configured to avoid any potential for serious overselling/underselling issues.

Verify requirements for stock sync

Requirements before requesting activation

  • All stores and sales channels are connected

  • Your stores are set to automatically sync orders

  • Catalog setup is complete.

    • All kits are imported and configured.

    • All listings are linked to the correct items.

    • Any/All duplicate item SKUs for the same product are merged or

    • All listings with duplicate SKUs but are actually separate products were split / uncombined.

  • You have taken an export of your inventory and item catalog from your sales channel. You should know how to restore this import directly on your sales channel if needed.

  • You have verified that inventory counts within SKULabs are accurate.

  • You have determined how you will deduct shipped orders. This is required to maintain accurate inventory, especially if you don't intend to ship or process orders using the SKULabs app.

  • You have configured each store's linked warehouses in your stock sync settings without selecting enable stock sync.

  • You fully understand that warehouse counts are combined. e.g. A single SKU has 55 in warehouse A and 33 in warehouse B; If both warehouses are linked to the same store, a total of 88 will be pushed to your store for that SKU.

  • Any/all existing or previous systems, that manage stock levels on your sales channel's must be deactivated prior to enabling stock sync in SKULabs.

Requirements after activation

  • All changes to stock MUST be made in SKULabs. SKULabs is by definition a master of inventory system once stock sync is enabled and will override the quantities on your sales channels.

  • If you upload product feeds with incorrect inventory counts, be sure to run a manual stock sync in SKULabs to correct for these mistakes.

  • Periodically count inventory to maintain accurate stock levels in SKULabs.

  • Don't change how you process orders without speaking with the team. By default, all orders must be deducted in SKULabs and by default you're required to do that in-app by creating shipping labels. If an order can't or won't be shipped inside the SKULabs app, add a manual shipment, bulk deduct, or set up auto-deduct with our team to otherwise handle outside shipment inventory deduction.

  • SKULabs usually pushes a quantity of 0 for items with negative inventory.

  • Use stock rules to further customize the quantity we push to your store. Implement overstock or understocking to achieve sales goals with stock rules.

  • Avoid overselling by implementing a safety stock strategy.

How to request verification

Once you believe you've met all of the requirements or if you're ready to talk to our team about setting up auto-deduction for shipments made outside of SKULabs fill out our activation form and we'll either provide you the activation code or we will reach out after confirming your account is correctly configured.


How to configure stock sync for your store

Stock sync can be enabled, disabled, and customized by visiting your settings, clicking the inventory tab at the top, then clicking the stock sync option.

Click the orange pencil icon on the right to modify a store's stock sync settings.

Choose your store's linked warehouses

Edit a store and select the warehouses you want linked to a location. Each linked warehouse's stock is added together when pushing stock to listings at that location.

e.g. "Main Warehouse" has 55 purple spoons. "Overstock Warehouse" has 33 purple spoons. Linking both warehouses to the store "USA Shopify" will push a quantity of 88 for purple spoon listing on that store.

If the location requires automated deduction, such as a POS location, link it to a single warehouse so orders can be automatically deducted.

If a location that requires automated deduction is linked to multiple warehouses, reach out to our team in chat for ways to configure your deduction strategy. There are ways to route deductions to warehouses based on rules. Otherwise, this will result in no control over which SKULabs warehouse is used for automated POS order deduction and it may cause unexpected behavior.

Set your store's stock rule

Stock rule determines the quantity to push to listings on your sales channel. The default stock rule "free" is calculated as the quantity you have "on hand" minus your sold inventory known as your "reserve". Stock rules can be configured per store as well as per listing. View our advanced stock rule settings for more information.

Stock sync enabled

This option allows you to begin the in-app activation steps for enabling stock sync. To update your warehouse links without enabling stock sync, leave this unchecked before clicking save.

Re-push stale stock

Periodically push stock quantities to listings, even if their quantities have not changed recently. This option helps prevent discrepancies from any accidental stock changes made directly on the channel.

Push negative stock

(Currently only supported on Shopify and BigCommerce)

By default, SKULabs push "0" for items that are not available to sell or allowed to purposefully oversell. For certain stores, this can be overridden. We recommend keeping this option disabled unless you are certain you want to push negative stock levels to your store.

Restrict picking to linked warehouses

This option can help prevent your team from mistakenly deducting orders from the wrong warehouse. This is useful if you have very strict order routing pre-determined by the order's origin location.

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