Overselling

Overselling is when you take money for something you cannot send. The website said two were left, but in truth the last one went over the counter an hour earlier. So somebody has now paid for a box that does not exist, and you are the one who has to write the apology.

It happens because the same product is counted in more than one place. The till in the shop keeps a number, the website keeps its own, and the marketplace page keeps a third. Each one is right about its own sales and blind to the other two, so the gap opens quietly on a busy Saturday. Nobody sees it until a customer complains.

The cure is one stock number that every channel reads and writes. When the till sells one, the website has one fewer in the same second, not tonight and not tomorrow morning. That timing is the whole point, because a count that catches up overnight still leaves a full day of promises you cannot keep. It is called live stock deduction, and it is why shops leave spreadsheets behind. Storek keeps one shared number for the counter, the website and the marketplace, so a sale anywhere moves the same figure.

A small buffer covers the rest. You hold back two or three units of a fast seller from the website, so the site shows zero while a few are still on the shelf. You lose a little revenue and stop the apology emails, and most owners decide that trade is worth making. They usually find that out only after the first bad week.

Marketplaces punish overselling harder than customers do, because cancelling too many orders pushes your listings down the page or suspends the account for a while. That penalty costs far more than the one sale you should never have taken. It is why Linkysoft asks a shop how many orders it cancelled last month, since the answer says more about its stock than any demonstration.

When it does happen, phone the customer before they phone you, then offer the money back or a firm new date and let them choose. Handled in an hour an oversell is forgettable, while the same mistake left for three days turns into a public review. So Linkysoft builds the shared stock number into the web application that runs the shop. The same figure sits on a phone app, so staff on the floor can see the real count before they promise anything.