Oversells

An oversell occurs when a product is sold on a sales channel, but you have no stock available.

Oversells can happen for a number of reasons:

• The product has been purchased at the same time on two different sales channels. 
• The sales channel (eg. The Iconic) has instigated a manual payment review on an order.  When this happens the order goes through hours or days later and in the mean time you have sold out.
• Inventory management configuration in Hard to Find product settings.
• Duplicate SKUs in your Shopify store
• Deleted or amended SKUs in your Shopify store. 

What to do:

• 1)     If the product has been purchased at the same time on two different sales channels. 

There is a time lag between a sale being made and the stock level being updated by IDA Connect.  The time depends on your IDA Connect sync cycle.  IDA Connect Starter Plan accounts sync every 60 mintues.  Scale Plan accounts sync every 5 minutes.  You can check your next sync time from your IDA Connect dashboard.

If too many products have been sold before the sync cycle has run, then you might get an oversell.

To find out if this has happened, check the inventory history for the SKU (variant) in your Shopify store.  You will be able to check the time that the stock level went to zero. 

If the stock level went to zero after the IDA Connect sync, then two products were sold at (approximately) the same time.

In this case, it is best to cancel one of the customer orders.

You can prevent this from happening by setting reserve stock levels.  To do this, go to your sales channel connector settings page on the IDA Connect Dashboard.  The reserve stock level is a number subtracted from the master stock level to reduce the risk of oversells.

If the stock level went to zero before the order was synced then you should log the oversell with us.  We can check our logs to see if the sales channel sold the product despite its stock level being zero (see reason (2)).

• 2)     The sales channel has instigated a manual payment review on an order

Sometimes, a sales channel will delay an order.  This can happen if they place an order on hold to do a manual payment review or for other reasons.  When this happens, the order goes through hours or days later and in the meantime you have sold out. 

• 3)     Duplicate SKUs in your Shopify store

If you have the same SKU attached to more than one product variant in your Shopify store, this can cause problems.  Duplicate SKUs cause inventory levels for the affected product variants to flip flop between different numbers each sync cycle.

If you think this is happening, check for duplicate SKUs in your Shopify store. 

• 4)    Deleted or amended SKUs in your Shopify store

If you have deleted or changed the SKU code of a listed product/variant in Shopify, this can cause oversells.

If you delete a SKU be sure to also delete or deactivate in your sales channels.

If you change a SKU for a listed product, be sure to also change it in your sales channels.  Then perform a product reset. 

Avoid recycling or reusing old product listings for new products; if the SKUs end up being for different products on your Shopify store and sales channel there will be problems with customer orders and stock levels.  

- 5) Hard to Find Inventory Errors.

See related article.