How to transfer current balances to an online store and marketplaces: accounting centers, minimum balance, zero and negative positions

Inventory management for e-commerce: how to transfer accurate data on availability, warehouses, and minimum stock levels to an online store

Online retail requires immediate responses and highly accurate data because selling a product that is not actually in stock leads to order cancellations, loss of customer loyalty, and lower marketplace ratings. 

The flexible inventory management mode during synchronization is designed specifically to ensure that your online platform always displays accurate product availability. Business owners most often ask Torgsoft technical support specialists the following questions: 

The answers to these questions lie in configuring the synchronization settings correctly.

1. Selecting accounting centers (warehouses) for inventory transfer

If your business has several physical stores or warehouses, it is essential to define which stock is available to online customers.

In Torgsoft, you can specify exactly which accounting centers will provide product availability data for the online store. On the "Accounting centers" tab in the synchronization object settings, select the warehouses whose stock should be totaled and exported to the website. To ensure that products are deducted automatically when an online order is placed, use the "Deduct products from" setting, where you specify the accounting center from which the customer invoice will be generated and issued.

Sometimes a product is available at several selected warehouses at different prices, while the warehouse from which it should be deducted has no record of that product at all because there have been no stock movements for it. In this case, the software will automatically identify the accounting center with the largest quantity of the product and use its retail price for transfer to the online store. If several warehouses have the same maximum quantity, the algorithm will select the warehouse with the highest retail price.

To avoid losing sales, you can also enable the "Offer products from other warehouses when unavailable" option. This allows the manager processing the order to easily deduct the product from another location in your chain if it unexpectedly runs out at the online store's primary warehouse.

2. Managing zero and negative stock balances

To prevent customers from ordering unavailable products, use the "Synchronize only products that are in stock" setting. When this function is enabled, all products with zero or negative quantities at the selected warehouses will be automatically removed from or hidden in the online store.

However, different platforms have their own specific scenarios for handling zero stock balances:

• For Prom marketplaces. Many business owners do not want to remove a product page completely when the product is temporarily unavailable. For this purpose, a special setting has been added to the "Synchronization files" tab — "Export products with zero quantity with the 'Expected' attribute". When this option is enabled, products with zero stock do not disappear but automatically receive the "Available on request" or "Expected" status, preserving their SEO positions and visibility to customers.

• For Rozetka.ua. The "Synchronize only products that are in stock" setting is hidden by the system for Rozetka objects. This is related to the marketplace's operating logic: the algorithm exports all products from the synchronization object to the price list (XML file), regardless of their warehouse availability. The actual availability status on the ROZETKA website, whether available or unavailable, is generated automatically based on the corresponding availability tags within the file.

3. Transferring the minimum stock level (safety stock)

To prevent products from being sold out completely, for example, when you need to retain a display item or a guaranteed reserve for offline customers, the minimum stock parameter can be exported to the website.

The "Minimum quantity in stock" data type has been added to the file fields in the synchronization object settings. This is a key field for determining the product status on the website because it allows the online store to understand when the product should be considered unavailable for ordering, even if it is still physically recorded in the database.

The minimum stock value transferred to the website depends on the basic settings of your Torgsoft software:

• If "Minimum product stock - For all warehouses" is selected in the warehouse parameter settings (Settings - Parameters - Warehouse), the software will export a single general minimum stock value to the online store, shared by all accounting centers.

• If you have enabled the paid function "Minimum and maximum product stock for each warehouse" and the parameters specify stock management "For each warehouse", the software will export the minimum stock value only for the accounting center specified in the synchronization object.

This provides automatic updating of safety stock levels on the website without the need to adjust the information manually, ensuring that online customers can order only products that are actually available for shipment.