Oversell avoidance

Hi eBeautySalon,

Thanks for posting your question here. While we do not have anything in place that will block you from posting an item manually with a quantity that is greater than the number you have in inventory, you can configure your Auto Relist Profiles to only automatically relist your items if you have over a certain amount left in inventory.

Most sellers who use our Inventory functionality along with Auto Relist Profiles want their items to automatically relist regardless of whether or not they sell until they have a certain quantity left in Inventory, although I certainly realize it is possible you have different needs.

If you would like to set up an Auto Relist Profile that will relist your items automatically in this manner, you will want to select the "Don't Auto-Relist based on items sold" and "At least ___ items are available in Inventory" options in the "I Want to Auto-Relist if" section of the profile.

Since you typically post listings that have a quantity of 20, I would recommend setting up your Auto Relist Profile to automatically relist your items as long as you have more than 20 left in inventory to avoid the risk of potentially selling items you do not have in stock.

There are also a couple other tools available on your Inventory Preferences page that can help you avoid overselling your items called Post Threshold and Stock Threshold which you can set up by mousing over the "My Account" tab within your account and selecting the "Inventory" option in the "Settings" section.

If you enter a numeric value in the "Post Threshold" field, our system will warn you if your stock level reaches or attempts to surpass that threshold during the listing process. If you enter a value in the "Stock Threshold" field, our system will send you an email notification when any of your items reach that stock level.

I hope this helps. If you need any further assistance with your account, please feel free to contact our customer support team by mousing over the "Help" tab within your account and selecting the "File Support Case" option.

-Mike

I wonder if this is similar to a 'problem' I'm having? i have an item up on ebay with a quantity of ~75 but in a choice of 10 colours. So far I have sold 1 black (qty 25 against 5 each of the colours, and 7 white) and 1 light pink but any of the colours I click on say 2 sold 2 left even if none of those colours have sold so anyone wanting to buy a certain colour when I've sold more than 4 will see it showing I've sold out.
I tried altering the remainder in eBay on the actual listing but it gets very confusiung knowing whether to add in more or remove actual quantities of that colour! I would have thought that during the Auctiva setup process, that putting in a number for each colour would make the listed colours only reduce by the number ACTUALLY sold PER colour, not the total quantity..

The explanation of Mike's looks quite long winded and complex as did another posting from Nov 11th under Listings with the title 'Please Help' - which seemed diferent in resolution from this one although it appears to be a very similar problem.

Hope there is an easy answer/solution to mine!

Thanks,

Paul

Hi Paul,

The situation you described actually does not involve the Auctiva Inventory system like the one described by the original poster, but I was able to easily reproduce this behavior and I believe it is expected based on how eBay handles the display of the quantity available and quantity sold for variation listings.

It appears that eBay updates the quantity available that is displayed dynamically based on which variation is selected (Colour in your case) and always displays the number of items sold from the listing regardless of colour as the number of items sold.

Although the variations that you enter when creating listings like this through Auctiva are submitted to eBay by our system, we do not actually have any role in how these values are updated on eBay as purchases are made from them.

If you feel that the quantity sold for these listings should update dynamically based on which variation is selected, you may want to contact eBay's Customer Support team to make them aware of your feelings - even if just as a suggestion.

-Mike