Syncing 4,000 SKUs across Shopify and Amazon every hour
Inventory and pricing across Shopify and three Amazon regions was a manual weekly job. The ops manager exported from Shopify on a Tuesday morning, transformed the file in a spreadsheet with regional pricing rules, and uploaded the result to Amazon Seller Central UK, DE and FR. Between Tuesdays, inventory drifted. Popular SKUs went out of stock on Amazon while Shopify still showed forty in hand. Lost sales were around thirty incidents a month, most caught after the fact by customer complaints.
What was getting in the way
Inventory and pricing across Shopify and three Amazon regions was a manual weekly job. The ops manager exported from Shopify on a Tuesday morning, transformed the file in a spreadsheet with regional pricing rules, and uploaded the result to Amazon Seller Central UK, DE and FR. Between Tuesdays, inventory drifted. Popular SKUs went out of stock on Amazon while Shopify still showed forty in hand. Lost sales were around thirty incidents a month, most caught after the fact by customer complaints.
How we shaped the fix
We built a sync layer that watches inventory and price changes in Shopify and pushes them to the three Amazon regions every hour, with the firm’s existing regional pricing rules baked in. Out-of-stock items get unlisted within fifteen minutes rather than at next Tuesday. Failed pushes route to an exception queue the ops manager reviews once a day. Shopify is the source of truth, which is how the brand already thought of it; the sync just made the rest of the stack catch up.
What changed
Inventory drift effectively gone. The Tuesday morning export job is retired, and the ops manager got that day back. Oversell incidents on Amazon dropped from around thirty a month to two. The two that still occur are now real edge cases worth investigating rather than the everyday cost of doing business.
What we did not change
The brand stayed on Shopify and Amazon. The pricing rules are the ones the ops manager had already written into a spreadsheet over two years; we just moved them into code. The fulfilment process, the product catalogue, and the regional accounts are exactly as they were. The Tuesday export simply does not happen any more.
The numbers
- 4,000 SKUs synchronised hourly across 4 channels
- ~30 to 2 oversell incidents per month on Amazon
- 15 minutes to unlist an out-of-stock SKU (from up to 7 days)
- 1 full day a week returned to the ops manager
What this would look like in your business
Multi-channel e-commerce brands of any size eventually run into this seam, and the cost is roughly proportional to catalogue depth and SKU velocity. The fix is not a new marketplace tool or a different platform. It is a small layer of plumbing that respects the source of truth you already use and lets the rest of the channels catch up in near-real time.
What this shipped back to the brand.
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