We support several models of stock level management depending on how you wish to work, during your setup process please let us know which way you want to work :
- True Stock Availability – this method means we maintain an accurate stock level for each product, this can be updated by you in a range of way details in the automation section below. generally the more automated and more often this can be done, the better the experience will be for your retailers and the less likely out-of-stock orders will come through .
- On/Off Stock Availability – with this method stock is either available or not available. To automate this we need some sort of regular file from you listing either all current in stock or all current out of stock items, we can create an automation to import that files and update stock levels for your products. With this simple on/off model, we usually update all in stock items to a set nominal figure (e.g. 250) and all out of stock items are decreased to 0, this will stop them being orderable by retailers (although we do have an account level settings so you can choose to still accept out of stock items if you support back orders (and your retailers are happy to send them).
Updating Stock levels
There are two main ways to update stock levels:
- Manually – You can easily login to your portal account then update stock levels on specific products, alternatively we have a data import tool so you can import csv files if you wish to update all your stock levels in one go. A sample format is below but we can work with any file type or format, please let us know what you need us to support.
- Automatically – Updates to stock level can easily be automated, we have the following options available which should enable you to hook up your existing systems easily.
- File Transfer via SFTP- if your system can provide an export of stock levels to a file, this can then be sent to us to update stock levels, either manually or automatically. Files can either be upload manually via our portal (Toosl > Importer)., We can support CSV, XLS, XLSX, TSV, XML, JSON or pretty much any other format available!
- Via Email – we can also provide a special email address which stock files can be emailed to, our systems will pick up these files and process them automatically
Example Stock Update File (CSV)
In the simplest format we only need to piece of information to update stock, the product sku and the desired stock level, below are two examples in different formats. We prefer CSV if possible, its the quickest & simplest to setup:
