I’m looking for some suggestions from the Shopify community regarding inventory management.
I’m currently selling products from around 15 different brands/vendors on my website. One challenge I’m facing is keeping my inventory in sync with the vendors’ inventory.
For example, if I work with 5 different vendors, sometimes a customer places an order for a product that appears to be in stock on my website, but the vendor has actually run out of stock. Currently, I have to manually check the vendor’s website before accepting the order.
I’m thinking about building a system that can regularly check the vendors’ inventory and automatically update my Shopify inventory based on their stock levels.
For example:
Vendor inventory → Sync system → Shopify inventory
The goal would be to keep the inventory updated automatically, ideally with regular updates (e.g. every few hours or within 24 hours), so that customers only see products that are actually available from the vendors.
I’d really appreciate the community’s suggestions on:
What would be the best approach to build this with Shopify?
Which Shopify APIs or features would be suitable for inventory syncing?
Would it be better to use webhooks, scheduled jobs, or another approach?
Are there any Shopify limitations or best practices I should consider?
I’m still exploring the idea and would really appreciate any suggestions or experience from developers who have built something similar.
Hey @Hamza_Ruel - this is doable, but the starting point is getting reliable inventory data from each vendor.
For a custom integration, use vendor webhooks where available, or scheduled jobs to fetch their inventory feeds, then update Shopify through inventorySetQuantities when your integration is the inventory source of truth:
The main caveat is accounting for recent orders so an older vendor count doesn’t restore stock you’ve already sold. Syncing every few hours reduces overselling risk but won’t eliminate it.
If your vendors also use Shopify, Collective is worth checking before building.
Thanks for the detailed breakdown, this is really helpful!
The inventorySetQuantities point makes sense, and I hadn’t thought carefully enough about the “recent orders” caveat that’s a really important catch. To handle that properly, would it be better to calculate a delta/adjustment (vendor’s new count minus their last known count) and apply that as a relative change, rather than setting an absolute quantity? That way a sale that happened on my store in between syncs wouldn’t get silently overwritten. Or is there a more standard pattern for reconciling this that people typically use?
Also good call on checking Collectiv a couple of my vendors are actually on Shopify, so I’ll look into that for those specific ones. For the rest, I think a custom scheduled-job + webhookss (where available) approach is the way to go.
Appreciate the pointer to the right mutation, will start prototyping with that.