Before you invest in inventory sync

This is cheap to get right at the start and expensive to retrofit. Before you spend anything on inventory sync, it is worth confirming a few things are already true.

In e-commerce every friction point has a price attached, and the arithmetic is unusually easy to check. Check it against what you would want a competitor's site to get wrong.

Prerequisites

• You can describe the outcome you want in one sentence
• Someone owns it after the work is done
• Selling something you do not have costs trust and money
• You have a way to tell whether it worked

What to watch for

Sync frequency matters more than sync sophistication. There is a version of this that is over-engineered, and it is worth avoiding. The version that survives contact with a real deadline is the simple one.

Decide up front what happens when stock hits zero. The cost of getting this wrong is rarely visible on the day it happens. Doing this properly once is usually cheaper than doing it approximately three times.

In practice

Small percentage changes matter here because they apply to every order, every month. Three things worth confirming about inventory sync before you move on:

• Someone can say what the current setup is without going to look
• Sync frequency matters more than sync sophistication — and you know whether that is true here
• There is a way to tell whether the last change to this helped

Worth checking on your own setup before it becomes someone else's problem to fix.