What is stock sync?
Stock sync is an opt-in feature which allows SKULabs to act as your master of inventory and push outbound inventory to your sales channel, overwriting the inventory quantities on your chosen products and sales channels.
How long does it take for inventory updates to sync to Shopify and other channels?
Usually a few minutes. SKULabs checks each store with stock sync enabled every few minutes and pushes any listing whose quantity changed since the last push. A stock change in SKULabs (an order, a receive, a deduction or an adjustment) normally reaches Shopify and your other sales channels within a few minutes.
It can take longer when:
The store has a large catalog or many changes at once. Each sync works through every changed SKU, so big updates take longer to finish.
The channel limits how fast we can send updates. Shopify, Walmart, Etsy and other channels cap how many requests they accept per second, so SKULabs slows down to stay within those limits.
The channel processes updates on its side. Amazon and Walmart accept stock as a feed and process it themselves, which can add more time before the new quantity shows on the listing.
The last push failed. A failed push is retried about an hour later. Hover the stock icon on the item's Listings section to see why.
SKULabs also re-sends unchanged stock every few days to correct any drift on the channel, when Re-push stale stock is on in the store's stock sync settings.
To check exactly when a SKU was last pushed and what value was sent, use the Stock sync breakdown (see below).
Preparing to enable stock sync
This is our technical guide for preparing for stock sync. It's important you read this once you're ready to take your first steps.
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
From your stock sync settings, edit a store to select the warehouses you want linked to a location.
How is inventory calculated when I select multiple warehouses?
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.
Allow negative stock
Available on Shopify and other channels that accept negative quantities. It is not available on BigCommerce, Amazon, Walmart, eBay, Etsy or Square, which reject negative counts, so the option is hidden for those stores. Instead of pushing 0 for anything that is unavailable, we can push the actual overcommitment of inventory to your sales channel. This can reveal sales figures for pre-orders on your website and is generally recommended to be left disabled.
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 and line-item assignments in Shopify.
How to check what stock was pushed (Stock sync breakdown)
Open an item or kit and look at its Listings section:
The Last stock pushed column shows the value for each channel location, for example "Boston: 0" and "WH MN: 2215" on a Shopify store with two locations.
Hover the stock icon to see why a listing isn't syncing, for example a deactivated or unlinked listing, a store with stock sync off, or a failed push.
Click Stock sync breakdown on a listing row to see every push for that SKU: Date, Location, Connected, Old push, New push and Status.
The breakdown keeps the last 30 days. Filter it by date, location, connected and status. An empty range means nothing needed pushing, not missing data. For Shopify, errors say whether the item no longer exists on Shopify or is not stocked at that location; a listing missing its Shopify location is skipped with a note to run a listings sync.