How Inventory Automation Works
Table of contents
- How does it work?
- Inventory Automation breaks down into 3 key components
- Full Upload Process
- Daily Update Process
- Inventory Management Tools
- Other Features Worth Noting...
How Does it Work?
Our Inventory Automation service allows you to automatically sync your dropship supplier's (or 3PL warehouse) inventory and product data to your e-commerce website or marketplace account.
Will Inventory Automation work with my store or e-commerce platform?
Our Inventory Automation service is currently integrated with many of the top online stores, marketplaces, and e-commerce platforms on the market.
See all our support platforms here
.
The Inventory Automation service breaks down into 3 key components:
-
Full Upload Process
-
Daily Update Process
-
Inventory Management Tools
Full Upload Process
A "Full Upload" is the
initial upload of your product data
in which the content data such as the supplier's images, titles, descriptions, categories, and more are uploaded to your e-commerce website. This is often referred to as a "
Full Product Data Sync
". This process is typically only run once in the lifetime of a product as after the product data has been uploaded once, that product the switches to the "daily update" process noted below. Running the "full upload" only once prevents overwriting any customizations you have made on your e-commerce website to that product listing such as modified product titles, descriptions, etc. If you need to overwrite your data for whatever reason, you can request we run another full upload by entering a support ticket at any time. This will overwrite your data and in some cases (changing category mapping) it requires you to first delete all product data to ensure there is no old data remaining after the full upload.
In the case of uploading to marketplaces that house their own content data, such as Amazon, this process is simply matching the UPC from the supplier with the Marketplace listing's existing content data. There is no actual "upload" of images, titles, etc.
Daily Update Process
Depending on your monthly plan, your account can be configured for 2x/day or
Optimized
Sync
updates.
Our "Daily Updates" are essentially what they sound like. We update the price, quantity, and "status" of the product on a 2x daily basis. These updates typically occur once in the early morning and once in the afternoon (EST).
Your daily updating email contains 4 important metrics.
-
Total Product Count
-
Success Count
-
Failure Count
-
New Count
Total Product Count:
This is the number of products we are monitoring for your store. If we have loaded 500 products to your store in the first full upload, we will then be monitoring a Total Product Count of 500 products to update the price, quantity, and status. Even if items go "out of stock" we are still monitoring that product in the Total Product Count as we are monitoring the quantity.
Success Count:
This is the number of products we have successfully monitored, even if no change was made to the product. If SKU123 had a quantity of 10 yesterday and today it still has a quantity of 10, it counts as a success.
Failure Count:
The number of products we are supposed to monitoring in the "Total Product Count" that we were unable to successfully update. This is regardless of if an update is needed or not to the product, if we were unable to "connect" to the product it will show as a "failure".
New Count:
The number of products loaded to your store per your supplier's feed and your product filter settings. These are typically "new products" that were not previously on your store,
not
a product that was out of stock and is now back in stock.
This number can be greater than 0 in two typical scenarios.
-
Scenario #1: The supplier has added more products into their feed and you have load new products set to "on" (as discussed above).
-
Scenario #2: You have changed/removed a filter in which new products are now loading to your store that were previously filtered.
What does the Success, Failure, & New Counts Mean?
Once you sign up for our Inventory Automation Service you will begin receiving daily updates via email on the inventory uploaded to your website.You will also see a "Product Count" in your Dashboard Update History Report:
This count can also be found on your main Inventory Automation "Feed Manager" page:
This number shows how many products will show up on your site with the settings you have set in your tools that we've supplied to you. The available products shown to the right we'll discuss later on in this document.The Dashboard Update History will also include any new products that were added during the daily update.
These could be products that are newly added to the feed, products that were recently out of stock but are not in stock, or if you've changed your settings overnight and the settings you've changed included more products.
-
The Inventory Management Tools
Our Inventory Management tools are what make managing thousands of dropship products feasible. They provide powerful bulk management features while also allowing for specific customization of your product data. Our new Catalog Manager Catalog Manager Tool: Tutorial Guides
-
Other Features Worth Noting...
Store Sync: This is when you choose to keep your store in sync with your supplier's feed as it loads new products. When a new product is added into your supplier's feed it will automatically upload to your eCommerce website or marketplace account with a full upload. This is found in your "price markup tool" settings as "Load new products automatically"Optimized Sync: We sync as real-time as made possible by the supplier. Our system will be alerted when a change has been made in the feed by the supplier and immediately initiate a push to update the data on your channel (no more scheduled daily updates).So if your supplier updates data every 15 minutes or every hour, we will constantly be checking to be ready to immediately update the quantity, price, status, or addition of any new products.New Product Alerts: If you have store sync turned on or not it is always good to stay informed of the new products your supplier is loading into their feed. You can choose to be notified by email on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis.