Is this the same as building a marketplace?
No, and they are close to opposites. Building a marketplace, which we cover on our marketplace platform development page, means you operate the venue: third-party sellers list on your site, you handle seller onboarding, split payments, escrow, and payouts, and you earn commission. This page is about selling your own stock on marketplaces that somebody else operates. You are the seller there, not the operator, and none of the commission or payout machinery applies. If you are trying to decide which you actually want, tell us and we will point you to the right one.
How does this relate to your PIM software page?
A PIM owns product data: attributes, copy, imagery, and validating completeness against each channel's rules before anything is published. Marketplace integration consumes that data and handles the transport, mapping, and everything that comes back the other way, which a PIM does not do. If your product data is already in reasonable shape, you may need only this. If listings are inconsistent and assembled per channel by hand, the PIM work usually has to come first or the integration will faithfully publish bad data faster.
How does this relate to your inventory management page?
Inventory management owns the stock ledger: one authoritative position, movements, and reservations. This page owns pushing a derived sellable figure to each channel and handling what happens when a channel rejects or lags. The distinction matters commercially, because if each of your channels currently holds its own count, integration alone will not stop overselling. It will just distribute the wrong number more efficiently. We check the ledger position during the audit and tell you plainly if that is the real project.
Which marketplaces can you integrate?
Any that expose a seller API, which covers Amazon through SP-API, Lazada, Shopee, eBay, Tokopedia, and most regional platforms. We are not an official partner or certified integrator of any of them and we do not claim to be. What we do is read the current API documentation for your specific categories and channels during the audit, because capability varies by category and by seller account type, and confirm what is actually possible before quoting rather than after.
Will this stop us overselling?
It substantially reduces it, and honesty requires saying it cannot eliminate it. No marketplace API updates instantly, so there is always a window between a sale and the channel knowing about it. What the integration does is make that window short and known rather than long and unmeasured, and apply per-channel buffers sized to your actual sales velocity on each line. Retailers who need zero oversell on scarce items usually hold a reserved allocation per channel instead of a shared pool, which trades some sell-through for certainty.
How fast does stock actually update?
It depends on the channel and on your catalogue size, and anyone quoting a single number across all marketplaces is not being straight with you. What we commit to is measuring it per channel during rollout and telling you the observed figure, then setting buffers on that evidence. Movement-driven updates on a priority queue mean a fast-selling line propagates in a very different time from a bulk catalogue refresh, which is the point of building it that way.
What happens when a marketplace changes its API?
It will, usually with notice and occasionally without. Each channel is an isolated adapter specifically so a breaking change is contained, and contract tests run against recorded responses so a change is detected rather than discovered through a rejection spike. We set up monitoring for deprecation notices during handover. Ongoing adaptation is real work that has to be owned by someone, either your team or under a support arrangement, and we would rather agree that up front than leave it ambiguous.
Can you handle marketplace-operated fulfilment programmes?
Yes. Stock allocated to a marketplace's own fulfilment programme is tracked as a separate location in the stock model, because it is physically not in your warehouse and cannot be sold from your other channels. Inbound shipments, returns held at their facility, and reconciliation of their inventory reports against your ledger are all part of the work. This is a common source of phantom stock when it is not modelled properly.
Do you build automated repricing?
We integrate repricing behind explicit constraints, and we are cautious about it. The constraints matter more than the algorithm: a hard floor tied to your actual landed cost and target margin, a ceiling, rules about which competitors are even considered, and a circuit breaker on unusual movement. An unbounded repricer chasing a competitor whose own repricer is chasing you is a well-documented way to sell stock below cost overnight.
How do you measure whether this worked?
Against baselines captured before we start: hours per day spent on portal work, cancellation rate from stock issues, time to list a new product on each channel, and the gap between marketplace availability and true availability. Contribution per channel after all fees is the fourth, and it is often the one that changes decisions. We agree these at the audit so the assessment is against your numbers rather than a general claim of efficiency.
Can we start with one channel and add others later?
That is the approach we recommend regardless of budget. The first channel is where the mapping model, the queue behaviour, and the buffer logic get proven, and those carry over. Subsequent channels are meaningfully cheaper because only the adapter and mappings are new. Building three at once costs more, delays the first working result, and gives you no evidence about the approach before you are committed to it.
