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What Stock Sync does
Stock Sync (its full name is Channel Hub Stock Sync) keeps the stock of our offers on eMAG, Fashion Days and ABOUT YOU in line with the stock in the PIM, our product information system. It runs on its own, all day. You watch it, and step in when it asks you to.
In one sentence: every 15 minutes Stock Sync reads the stock from the PIM, works out how many pieces each marketplace offer may show, and sends the new number to the marketplace, but only when that number has changed.
The problem it solves
A marketplace sells what it thinks we have. If its number is out of date, one of two things goes wrong:
| What goes wrong | What it looks like | What it costs |
|---|---|---|
| Overselling | The warehouse sold the last jacket in the shop yesterday, but eMAG still shows 1. A customer orders it. | A cancelled order, an unhappy customer, and a penalty on our seller rating. |
| Stale stock | 20 pieces arrived this morning, but Fashion Days still shows 0. | Lost sales. The offer looks sold out while the goods sit on the shelf. |
Stock Sync makes the marketplace follow the PIM within about 15 minutes of a change there, with no manual work.
The big picture
Stock Sync has two inputs and one output:
- The PIM tells it, for every product, how much stock there is and how long the product takes to ship (its lead time).
- The marketplace tells it, once a day (and whenever an operator asks), which offers we have on each seller account and what stock each one currently shows.
- Stock Sync sends each offer's new stock number to the marketplace.
Everything it does is visible on its screens, and they update live as it happens: the Overview, every offer and order of every account, the accounts with a workspace each, and Activity, where every change, every background run and every set-aside message is listed. The page The journey of a stock number follows one number through the whole trip.
Who uses it
| Who | What they do with it |
|---|---|
| Marketplace operations (the people who run eMAG, Fashion Days and ABOUT YOU day to day) | Check every morning that stock is flowing, look into offers that were refused, go Live with new accounts, pause an account during an incident |
| Product owner | Decides the business rules (which stock to publish, lead-time limits) and approves going Live |
| Testers | Check that the rules on these pages hold, usually on an account in Preview |
| Technical team | Fix what the screens say needs a technical fix, for example a PIM outage or a password that can no longer be read |
Everyone signs in with their company Microsoft account and has one of two roles. A viewer can see every screen but has no buttons that change anything. An operator can also add accounts, go Live, pause, recover, resend and release. See Signing in and roles and Who can do what.
What it does, and what it does not do
Stock Sync does one job. It is worth being clear about its limits, because people often expect more of it.
| Stock Sync does | Stock Sync does not |
|---|---|
| Change the stock quantity of offers that already exist on the marketplace | Create offers, list new products, or delete offers |
| Link an offer to a PIM product by the PIM product id on eMAG and Fashion Days (the offer id is the PIM product id), and by the SKU on ABOUT YOU | Link offers by barcode (EAN), or by SKU on eMAG and Fashion Days. Those are shown only so you can find an offer |
| Publish the PIM's available stock on every account (on hand is shown, never sent) | Keep a safety buffer (such as "stock minus 1") or a minimum |
| Send 0 for a product whose lead time is longer than the account allows | Change the handling time, delivery promise or any other offer field |
| Send 0 for an offer whose product was removed from the PIM | Change prices, campaigns or promotions |
| Retry on its own when the marketplace is busy | Handle orders, invoices, returns or shipping labels |
| Record every change and every message exchanged with the marketplace (kept 90 and 30 days) | Write anything back to the PIM or to the warehouse system |
| Show what it would send, in Preview, before an account goes Live | Decide which products are sold on which marketplace. People decide that when they list a product |
Offers are listed by hand
Which products are sold on which account is still decided by people, when they list a product on eMAG, Fashion Days or ABOUT YOU. Stock Sync only looks after the stock of what is already listed. See Matching offers to products.
Where to go next
- Key ideas in five minutes: the words this guide uses, each with a short example.
- The journey of a stock number: the whole trip from the PIM to the marketplace, step by step.
- The daily check: what to look at every morning.
- Worked examples: real-looking situations and what you will see on screen.