eCommerce Inventory Management

Channels are the different online platforms where consumers interact with your business — hence the term "multichannel inventory." Common examples include websites like Amazon and eBay, but these are far from the only ones. A company's own site is also considered a channel. Channels are divisible by two main types:

• Sales channels: Sales channels are channels where your products are actually sold. Direct sales channels, like your company website or even a physical store, connect you with customers directly. Indirect sales channels work through a third party, like Etsy or eBay.
• Marketing channels: Marketing channels are channels where your products are advertised, but not sold. These channels are generally intended to point customers to sales channels. Examples include Pinterest and Facebook ads.

In other words, your channels are the elements you're organizing with the inventory software. If the software as a whole is the "what," integrations are the "how" that propels the process.

The factor that makes integrations for inventory management so beneficial is that they work two ways. When people make purchases on a site that's integrated into your multichannel inventory system, the software will receive the information about the purchase — even as it's doing the same for purchases on other sites. All that information is compiled into one place where you can easily see it.

When a purchase is made, the software will update your inventory on each of the other sites to accurately reflect how much of each product you have in stock. These updates save an incredible amount of time and effort on your end. The alternative is to keep up with each channel manually, updating the channel with inventory information and simultaneously updating your inventory information based on purchases made on the channel.

Finale Inventory offers over 40 different software integrations, from marketplace platforms to shopping cart software. You can even enter and sync data from sales made over the phone or by fax.

When stock levels are changed, Finale can be configured to auto-update stock levels to prevent overselling on your online channel. In addition to lost sales, oversold products create unhappy customers, negative feedback, and lower rankings. Worse, online marketplaces like Amazon will not allow you to sell on their channel if overselling becomes a problematic issue.

Say goodbye to manual updating with the e-commerce inventory management solution! If a sale is made on one website, Finale will automatically update inventory levels across all of your sales channels. We track product levels 24/7, and sync across marketplaces every 5 minutes while processing tens of thousands of orders per month! Finale will auto-update Amazon, Magento, and many other marketplaces and shopping carts. A complete list of the integrations can be found here.

Standard channels aren't the only things that can be integrated. Many types of inventory management software also offer the ability to integrate point solutions. Point solutions are smaller, more specific versions of inventory software. Standard inventory software performs a wide variety of functions, but point solutions focus on particular tasks. For example, one type of point solution could be dedicated to updating in- and out-of-stock labels on different sites.

Though point solutions are more limited in scope than broader software, their focus allows them to be more detail-oriented in their approach. For this reason, many businesses opt to use point solutions for particular tasks. Point solutions aren't designed to replace inventory management software. Instead, they work alongside them.

Most inventory management software will integrate point solutions just like it integrates other channels. If you have a point solution for a particular job, your leading software will let it do the detail work on that task. The software will import that information from the point solution afterward, so you can still have everything in one place.

Finale Inventory allows for integrations with several different types of point solutions. You can sync with channel management software such as Zentail or with accounting software like QuickBooks. Each of these point solutions will continue to do the jobs you already use them for, but they will transmit their information to your Finale Inventory software to have it in the same place as everything else.

Once you're operating through multiple channels, the days of being able to track your inventory solely through spreadsheets are over. Dealing with more than one channel is complicated, especially when it comes to e-commerce. What seems simple to customers — navigating to an eBay page, seeing "in stock," hitting purchase and seeing their product delivered within the next week — is much more complex behind the scenes.

Each of those steps has to be facilitated by an organized inventory. Your company has to maintain that eBay page, keep the stock numbers updated accurately to avoid overselling, refresh them again after the purchase is made and get that product shipped to the customer by the specified date. That's enough to deal with through just one channel, but having multiple channels makes it exponentially more difficult. Each channel will have a different format and a different way of letting customers make a purchase, and your business has to keep up with all of them.

If you fail to maintain your presence adequately on different channels, the consequences can be costly. To start, you may lose customers if your stock is too low to facilitate all their orders. More direct financial costs exist as well. Retailers across the globe lose over a trillion dollars per year from overselling, overstocking and unneeded returning of products. To avoid these expenses, you must have an efficient way of managing all your channels and the inventory associated with each of them.