For any e-commerce business, managing inventory is a delicate balancing act. Stock too little, and you risk frustrating customers with "out of stock" messages and losing sales. Stock too much, and you tie up valuable capital in unsold goods. This challenge is magnified for businesses selling across multiple channels like a Shopify store, Amazon, and eBay. Our client, a rapidly growing online retailer, was facing this exact problem.
This case study details how we built an n8n-powered automation that synchronized their inventory in real-time across all sales channels, preventing overselling and saving their team hours of manual work each day.
The Client: A Multi-Channel Retailer
Our client, "Urban Homeware," sells a curated collection of home goods. They started on Shopify but quickly expanded to Amazon and eBay to reach a wider audience. This growth, however, brought significant operational headaches.
The Challenge: Disconnected Inventory and Manual Updates
Urban Homeware's inventory was not synchronized. A sale on Amazon would not automatically update the stock level on Shopify or eBay. This led to a cascade of problems:
- Overselling: They frequently sold items that were already out of stock on another platform, leading to canceled orders, angry customers, and negative reviews.
- Manual Reconciliation: The team spent 2-3 hours every day manually adjusting stock levels across the three platforms. This was tedious, time-consuming, and prone to human error.
- Inaccurate Forecasting: Without a single source of truth for their inventory, they couldn't accurately forecast demand or make informed purchasing decisions.
- Lost Sales Opportunities: Fear of overselling led them to be overly conservative with their stock levels, often showing items as "out of stock" when they were available on another platform's allocation.
The Solution: A Centralized n8n Inventory Hub
We proposed and built a series of interconnected n8n workflows to act as a central nervous system for their inventory management. The core of the solution was a Google Sheet that served as the master inventory list.
1. Real-Time Order Monitoring:
We set up dedicated webhook workflows for each platform:
- A Shopify Trigger node for new orders on their main store.
- A Webhook node to receive new order notifications from Amazon's Seller Central API.
- A Webhook node for new orders from eBay's API.
When an order was placed on any channel, the corresponding workflow would trigger instantly.
2. Master Inventory Update:
Each trigger workflow would extract the SKUs and quantities from the new order. It would then execute a central "Update Inventory" sub-workflow. This sub-workflow did the following:
- Read Current Stock: It used the Google Sheets node to look up the current stock level for each SKU in the master inventory sheet.
- Calculate New Stock: It subtracted the ordered quantity from the current stock.
- Write New Stock: It updated the master Google Sheet with the new, lower stock level.
3. Cross-Platform Synchronization:
Once the master sheet was updated, a final workflow would trigger. This "Sync to Platforms" workflow would:
- Read the updated SKU and its new stock level from the master sheet.
- Use the Shopify node to update the inventory level for that product on their Shopify store.
- Make an API call via the HTTP Request node to update the stock level on Amazon.
- Make another API call to update the stock level on eBay.
The Results: Efficiency, Accuracy, and Growth
The impact of this automation was immediate and profound:
- 99% Reduction in Overselling: By synchronizing inventory in near real-time (the entire process took less than 2 minutes), instances of selling out-of-stock items were virtually eliminated.
- 10+ Hours Saved Per Week: The team was completely freed from the daily grind of manual inventory updates, allowing them to focus on customer service and marketing.
- Single Source of Truth: The master Google Sheet provided a clear, accurate, and up-to-the-minute view of their entire inventory, enabling data-driven purchasing decisions.
- Increased Customer Satisfaction: With fewer canceled orders and more accurate stock information, customer trust and satisfaction improved significantly, leading to better reviews and repeat business.
Conclusion
This case study illustrates how a well-designed automation workflow can solve a complex, multi-platform business problem. By using n8n to create a central hub for their inventory data, Urban Homeware was able to eliminate manual work, improve accuracy, and build a scalable operational foundation that could support their continued growth.