Question
I have a question about your Magento Integrator, and I think I know what the answer is, but I thought I'd ask it anyhow. We have Magento connect to both Amazon and eBay using a service called M2E. We also have an integration with our POS system that was written by our developer. It works, but I wouldn't say it works all that well. We have to manually run the integration every time we want to synchronize data between the POS system and Magento. It's a total pain, but we can live with it. What we cannot live with is the overselling that's happening on Amazon and eBay. It is killing our rating with Amazon, and I'm worried they're going to drop us if we don't do something soon.
Can you do anything to help us here? We need to stop overselling as soon as possible. Thank you.
Answer
I understand your situation completely; we use M2E all the time when we need to connect Magento to Amazon and eBay. What's nice about M2E is that it integrates both Products and Orders. The important item in your scenario is getting those orders from Amazon and eBay and then inserting them into Magento. This is something that M2E does for you automatically, as you know.
We've done something pretty brilliant with our Magento Integrator, and it's called Allocation. Allocation is something unique to our integration, and in a nutshell, it accounts for the orders sitting in Magento and dynamically adjusts the inventory for you automatically. Allocation not only works for those orders placed directly on your website but also those orders that are coming over from Amazon and eBay using M2E (M2E marks the status of the order as "Processing" in Magento, which is then picked up and included in our Allocation report). To really understand how our Allocation feature works, you'll want to read the following article:
Using our Magento Integrator would immediately solve the overselling problem you're experiencing now on Amazon and eBay because we'll be constantly adjusting the inventory for you to account for those orders sitting there in Magento, Amazon or eBay but have not yet been shipped. We can also make your life easier in general; given that our Magento Integrator is completely automated, you'll never have to manually upload anything ever again.
Please let us know if you're interested in our Magento Integrator, we'd love to help you. Thanks.