Most inventory problems aren't storage problems, they're synchronisation problems. The shelf says one thing, the system says another, and three sales channels each believe something different. We build the layer that keeps them agreeing, so you stop overselling, stop stocking out on your best SKUs, and stop reconciling by hand on Mondays.
80% faster data entry across a 5,000+ SKU catalogue · You own the code
Every business has at least one of these breaks. Most have three and only notice the one that caused an oversell.
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Consultup IndiaSiddhrajUnoloftKofeko3nStarVedaCerataShubhamConsultup IndiaYou oversold because the Amazon listing was working from a number that was fourteen minutes old, and in those fourteen minutes the same unit sold on Shopify. Nobody made a mistake. The systems just weren't talking fast enough, and the customer found out before you did.
Then it compounds. You get cautious, so you pad every channel with a buffer, and now you're deliberately not selling stock you have, on every SKU, permanently. That's the invisible half of the problem: the safety margin that stops the oversells is also a standing tax on revenue.
Meanwhile the count itself has drifted. A return came back and went on the shelf but not into the system. A damaged unit got written off in a WhatsApp message. A pallet arrived and got received in bulk against a PO that had two SKUs on it. By quarter-end the variance is big enough that somebody schedules a full count, the warehouse shuts for a day, and the number is accurate for about a week.
And the purchasing decisions on top of all this are being made from a spreadsheet that was exported on Monday, by someone who knows it's wrong and is guessing by how much.
The cost of a wrong stock number is never one wrong stock number. It's a cancelled order, a padded buffer on every SKU, a purchase order sized by guesswork, and a full count that fixes it for a week.
Same engineering underneath. What changes is which problem it's pointed at.
Shopify, WooCommerce, Amazon, eBay, and your POS working from one number, updated on sale rather than on a schedule, with the update queued and retried rather than lost when a channel's API is slow.
Available-to-promise calculated properly: on-hand minus allocated, reserved, and pending returns. So you can run a thin buffer instead of a defensive one and sell the stock you actually have.
A bundle sale draws down its components across every channel, which is where most off-the-shelf sync tools quietly break.
Inspected, graded, and returned to the correct location automatically rather than sitting in a corner uncounted.
Moving data between systems on a schedule is workflow automation and is often cheaper as its own scope. If your problem is entirely "these two systems don't talk," say so on the call, that's a smaller project than anything on this page and we'll price it that way.
Export stock from three places, reconcile in a spreadsheet, update channel listings by hand.
An oversell on Amazon. Apologise, cancel, absorb the metric hit.
Purchasing decisions made from Monday's export, which is already wrong.
A customer asks if something's in stock. Someone walks to the shelf to check.
A return arrives. It goes on the shelf. It doesn't go in the system.
Variance is large enough that nobody trusts the number. Schedule a full count.
The number is already right. Nobody exports anything.
A channel's API failed for six minutes. It retried, caught up, and alerted us. You didn't notice.
Reorder suggestions generated from live velocity and lead times. Someone approves them.
The answer is on screen, with allocated and in-transit stock accounted for.
The return was scanned in on a phone at the returns desk. It's sellable stock.
Cycle counts have been running weekly. Variance is small enough to explain.
PartsFlow — a spare-parts distributor whose warehouse team was hand-keying inventory movements into QuickBooks across a 5,000+ SKU catalogue. Bulk validated imports and a live sync replaced row-by-row spreadsheet work: 80% faster data entry.
Any tool can store a quantity. Keeping it true under real conditions takes six specific things, and most off-the-shelf sync breaks on at least one.
Stock updates fire on the transaction, not every fifteen minutes. Scheduled sync means a guaranteed window in which every channel is wrong, and that window is exactly where oversells live.
Exactly one system owns the true count and everything else subscribes. Two systems both writing authoritatively is how counts silently diverge.
Channel APIs fail, throttle, and go down. Every update is queued with backoff and retry, and anything that can't be applied lands in a visible error queue, not a log file.
Sellable stock is on-hand minus allocated, reserved, and pending. Publishing raw on-hand to channels is the single most common cause of overselling.
Every change recorded with who, when, why, and what the count was before. Without it, an investigation into a variance has nowhere to start.
Rolling counts weighted by value and movement velocity, scheduled continuously. Accuracy maintained rather than restored.
Where a step genuinely needs judgement, grading a return, matching a mislabelled supplier delivery to a PO, that's an AI agent sitting inside one step of an otherwise deterministic system. Most inventory work isn't that, and we'll tell you which of your steps genuinely is.
Before we build anything, we establish how wrong the number currently is and why. A sample count against system records across a representative SKU set, plus a map of every place stock data is entered or changed. You get that written baseline whether or not you hire us.
A written scope, fixed price, and delivery date before any code is written, phased so you can see what goes live first. If scope moves, we re-quote in writing first.
Built against your real catalogue, not sample data. Then the new sync runs alongside your current process and you compare the two before switching anything off. Written update every Friday plus a short Loom walkthrough.
One channel at a time, reconciled before the next. After launch: sync monitoring with alerting, error-queue review, reorder-logic tuning as velocity changes, and handling channel API changes. A named engineer stays on it.
The inventory software market is genuinely good, and buying beats building more often than any agency page admits.
You sell reasonably standard products through channels the tool supports natively, your fulfilment process fits how the tool expects it to work, and your SKU count and order volume are inside what it handles comfortably. Cin7, Katana, Zoho Inventory, inFlow, Linnworks, or Shopify's native tooling will be live in weeks for a fraction of a custom build, and one of your own team can run it. We'll tell you this on the call and we won't quote you for something you don't need.
Your product structure fights the tool, bundles inside bundles, configurable products, batch and expiry rules, or components that behave differently by customer. Or your fulfilment doesn't match any tool's assumptions. Or you need a channel or 3PL that no product connects to. Or you've hit performance limits at your SKU or order volume. Or per-order pricing has stopped making sense at your scale. Or, most commonly, you already run an inventory tool and the problem is that it doesn't talk to the other three systems, which is an integration project, not a replacement.
| Off-the-shelf system | Custom build | |
|---|---|---|
| Time to live | Weeks | Longer, scoped after the count and baseline |
| Upfront cost | Low | Higher, fixed and quoted in writing |
| Ongoing cost | Per-order or per-seat, grows with volume | Hosting plus a monthly plan |
| Standard products and channels | Excellent | Overkill |
| Complex BOM, bundles, batch rules | Constrained by the tool's model | Whatever your products actually are |
| Unsupported channel or 3PL | Blocked, or via a fragile middleman | Anything with an API |
| Performance at high SKU/order volume | Degrades, tier upgrades | Designed for your scale |
| Ownership | You rent it | Code and data are yours |
Honest answer: the most common right answer isn't build or buy, it's keep what you have and fix the connections between it and everything else. That's a substantially smaller project than either column above, and it's what a good share of the enquiries on this page turn out to need.
Also connectable via API: Fishbowl, and most other inventory or warehouse software with a documented API. Not listed? If it has an API, we can almost certainly connect it. Some 3PLs and older warehouse systems still run on flat-file or EDI exchange, we'll tell you that before you commit and build to it properly rather than promising a real-time sync that isn't possible.
The stock number needs to be right, everywhere, all the time. A data accuracy and synchronisation problem.
You need the financial and operational system of record, where stock is one module alongside purchasing, costing, and ledgers. If the pain is month-end and margin rather than overselling, start there.
One team needs a screen for one job, a receiving app, a returns desk tool, rather than a whole inventory system.
You need to see stock position, ageing, and dead capital, read-only, without changing how anything is recorded.
The systems are fine and they just need to talk. Often the cheapest real fix here.
The engineering underneath all of these. If you're evaluating who can build custom software at all, not just this shape of it.
Honest answer: a large share of "we need a new inventory system" enquiries are one integration and a corrected available-to-promise calculation. That's weeks rather than months, and we'd rather scope it that way in week one.
Fixed price, quoted in writing before we start. No hourly billing, no surprise change orders.
One accurate stock number across your channels: event-driven sync, available-to-promise logic, retry queues, error handling, monitoring, and the first month of support.
Scoped and quoted after the count and baseline
Good for: the oversell problem, which is most enquiries.
A full system shaped around your products and process, locations, transfers, POs and receiving, reorder logic, barcode scanning, migrated from your current setup and phased live.
Priced once we know your process and product structure
Good for: teams whose product structure genuinely fights every off-the-shelf tool.
Sync monitoring, error-queue review, reorder-logic tuning, channel API changes, and a set amount of new work each month.
A monthly plan sized to your channels
Good for: teams where channels and SKU ranges keep changing, most clients end up here.
Every build includes monitoring for the first month. After that it's a monthly fee, see what that covers, and you can stop any time, you keep the source code, the data, and the documentation either way.
Two things together. Updates fire on the transaction rather than on a schedule, so there's no window where channels are working from a stale number. And what gets published is available-to-promise, on-hand minus allocated, reserved, and pending returns, not raw on-hand. Publishing raw on-hand is the most common cause of overselling and it's usually one calculation away from fixed.
Yes, within what each channel's API allows. Amazon in particular throttles and processes some updates asynchronously, so “real time” means seconds to a couple of minutes rather than instant, and any vendor promising instant Amazon updates is describing something the API doesn't offer. We build with queueing and retry so a slow or failed update catches up rather than being lost.
Usually not, and we'll say so. A good share of enquiries here are solved by connecting the existing tool properly to the channels, warehouse, or accounting system it doesn't currently reach. That's a much smaller project than a replacement and we'll price it as one.
Not on its own, drift comes from movements that happen without being recorded. What software fixes is the recording: barcode scanning at receiving, picking, and returns so movements are captured where they happen, movement history so variances can be investigated instead of guessed at, and cycle counting so accuracy is maintained continuously rather than restored once a year.
Yes, mobile-first, working on standard phones or dedicated scanners, with offline capture that syncs when there's signal. Receiving, picking, counting, and transfers. It's typically the single highest-impact component because it removes the largest source of count drift.
Yes, including nested bundles and multi-level bills of materials. Component availability is checked before a bundle or build is committed, and a sale decrements components correctly across every channel. This is where most off-the-shelf sync tools quietly break.
Location-level stock down to bin or zone, transfers tracked as their own state so a half-completed move can't vanish, and 3PL or WMS integration with reconciliation reporting so you can prove the numbers agree rather than assume it.
It depends on how clean your SKU data is and how many channels are involved, not how many units you hold, that's what the baseline measures before you get a date. Multi-channel sync includes a parallel run. Full system builds run longer and go live channel by channel.
Audited and cleansed before it moves, with the rules agreed in writing, then validated against the source before anything is switched off. Your current process keeps running in parallel until the new one reconciles. We don't do cutovers that depend on everything being right first time.
They do, usually without warning. Every sync ships with alerting so we find out before you do, and fixes to anything we built are covered by the monthly plan. Unmonitored syncs failing silently is the main way inventory accuracy quietly decays after a project ends.
You do. Source code, database, integration configuration, and documentation transfer to you on final payment, whether or not you keep us on a monthly plan. It runs in your accounts.
We're in Ahmedabad, India, and stay available for video calls in your US and UK working hours, not ours. A written update every Friday plus a short Loom walkthrough of what moved.
Book a 30-minute call. We'll trace where your stock number actually breaks, tell you honestly whether an off-the-shelf tool would fix it, and give you a fixed price if building is the right answer.
