Having to deal with angry customers is often inevitable, however when it is the result of them being sold a product that isn’t actually available, well that is something that can largely be avoided.

The reality is, listing unavailable stock and overselling a product doesn’t benefit anyone, least of all you as the seller. In fact, it can have catastrophic results on both your reputation and sales performance.

Now while it may seem easier said than done, it is ultimately your responsibility to ensure that you have the processes in place to avoid it, or at least significantly reduce the occurrence of overselling.  

Why does overselling occur?

While it is perfectly possible to run your business manually when selling a small number of products on a single selling channel, as soon as you begin to expand, this will become considerably more difficult.

Think about it. Even adding only one more channel automatically requires the need to manually synchronise stock on both, and a delay in doing so can very quickly mean that you are selling more products than you actually have available.

At a push, you can make this approach work by regularly updating your inventory in each channel. That said, it will add a lot of time and stress to your previous routine, and there will always be the risk that overselling could happen regardless.

Now the more you grow, the less feasible even that is as an option because you are ultimately just juggling your inventory and hoping for the best.

The bottom line is, as you grow your business the more difficult it is to manually handle your inventory and the more important it becomes to have an efficient solution in place.

What is the solution to overselling?

The most logical solution for reducing overselling is through the use of an inventory management system.

What this does is allow you to manage your inventory in a single place and automatically sync this inventory across your selling channels. From here, it will be able to automatically adjust your stock levels each time you make a sale.

In addition to this, a good quality multichannel inventory management software will also allow you to set channel-specific inventory levels, should you wish to make more stock available on one channel over another.  

With this process so critical to the success of your business, we have, we have put together some recommended inventory management techniques to help you get started.