When marketplaces live on their own timelines
At SellerHub, we were solving a pain every ecom team knows: the item has already been sold on WB, but Ozon still shows it as “in stock.” The result — oversell, stress, and support in firefighting mode.
At SellerHub, we were solving a pain every ecom team knows: the item has already been sold on WB, but Ozon still cheerfully shows it as “in stock.” The result — oversell, stress, and support in firefighting mode.
What we did: we introduced a reservation mechanism — when a sale happens, the item is temporarily blocked during processing so parallel orders don’t trigger a race condition. Yes, that same race condition that shows up uninvited.
We also accounted for eventual consistency: the price changes in SellerHub and gets pushed to 3 platforms, but each one updates at its own pace — it may delay or even reject the update. In practice, integrations are like people on a call: someone responds right away, someone in 20 minutes, and someone says “sorry, I was muted.”
So inventory synchronization is not if stock > 0, but careful work with locks, statuses, and asynchronous updates.