Running an internationalised ecommerce store is anything but easy. Not only do images and product texts have to match, product information and stock numbers must also be synchronized. This is something that takes up unnecessarily large resources for companies with several locales.
Djerf Avenue is one of the customers who have experienced this. They are one of Sweden’s fastest growing e-retailers. The administration of new products and the refill of old ones has taken a long time and has been experienced as far more complex than it needs to be. They currently have 6 different markets and a rolling flow of new products, which means that a lot of time is spent on synchronization between markets and products.
Djerf Avenue is one of the customers we think is extra exciting to work with as we are constantly evolving and forced to find new creative solutions to overcome whatever limitations present themselves during their growth journey. Therefore, we sat down with Djerf Avenue and looked at how we could facilitate the process and where the biggest problems lay.
WooCommerce does a good job of managing inventory at a single site level, but right now there is no support for managing an inventory displayed on multiple sites. We looked together at the existing plugin solutions but discovered that they simply don’t scale to Djerf Avenue’s needs.
Qala Single Stock
This created problems with overselling of products when stock was not sync’d fast enough. We knew that customer experience and brand reputation could end up damaged in the long run if this wasn’t solved. Having decided that none of the existing solutions were fit for purpose, Angry Creative designed our own: Qala Single Stock, specifically designed for high-scale stock sync across an internationalised WooCommerce site.
Djerf Avenue has continuous releases of products that generate high traffic, they have many orders per minute and this makes the synchronization between the different sites extremely important in order to not oversell. With Qala Single Stock, inventory status is managed for all sites in an economical, efficient and flexible way.
Qala Single Stock works by adding two new components to each product or variation. Each product belongs to a sync group. The combination of SKU and the sync group ID creates a unique combination in the database that manages inventory status. In this way, the same store can have multiple products in different sync groups, where the stock number for that SKU value is synchronized across all sites.
The plugin also works to reduce / remove overselling by reserving the product when the customer puts it in the shopping cart and keeping it reserved until either the customer has made a payment, the customer chooses to leave the page or if payment has not been approved.
We know this extension will make it easier for many merchants with internationalised WooCommerce multisite stores. This plugin will become an inclusive part of our Qala ecommerce platform in the next few weeks but it can also be retrofitted to existing sites.
Interested in using this solution? Do not hesitate to contact us!