Plenty of UK retailers never touch the stock they sell. A distributor holds it, sends you a product feed, and ships each order when you pass it on. It is a brilliant model for beauty, fragrance and homeware, because you can list thousands of products without a warehouse. It also lives or dies on the plumbing behind your shop. Get the sync, the pricing and the order flow right and it runs itself. Get them wrong and you spend your evenings refunding orders you could never fulfil.

Stock sync: never sell what is not there

Your supplier's feed is the single source of truth. It might arrive as a CSV on a schedule, an XML file, or a proper API, but it tells you what they hold and how many. Your shop should read that feed automatically and update every product's stock level without anyone opening a spreadsheet.

A few things separate a good sync from a fragile one:

  • Frequency. Fast-moving lines need checking often. A sync that runs once a night will happily sell the last bottle of a popular fragrance three times by lunchtime.
  • A safety buffer. If the supplier shows two in stock, it can be wise to show zero. Other retailers are selling from the same pool, and the feed is always slightly behind reality.
  • Handling the gaps. When a product drops out of the feed altogether, the shop should hide it or mark it unavailable, not leave it on sale with stale numbers.
  • Alerts when it breaks. If the feed fails to arrive, someone should know that day, not when the complaints start.

Rules-based pricing across thousands of products

Nobody can price ten thousand products by hand, and nobody should try. The answer is a set of pricing rules that sit on top of the supplier's cost price. The simplest is cost-plus: take the trade cost, add your margin, add VAT, round to a sensible price point. From there you can layer in different margins by brand, by category or by price band, because a £4 lip balm and a £90 candle rarely deserve the same markup.

The real value comes when costs move. Suppliers change their trade prices, sometimes across a whole brand overnight. With rules in place, the new cost lands in the feed, your selling price recalculates, and your margin holds. Without them, you find out months later that you have been selling a range at a loss.

Price the rules, not the products. Then a cost change becomes a non-event instead of a weekend of spreadsheet work.

Passing orders straight to the supplier

Once someone buys, the order needs to reach your supplier quickly and accurately: the products, the quantities and the customer's delivery address. Depending on what the supplier supports, that can be an API call, an automated email in their preferred format, or a file dropped on their server. Tracking numbers should then flow back into your shop so the customer gets their dispatch email without you copying anything across.

This is where manual processes quietly cost the most. Retyping orders into a supplier portal works at five orders a week. At fifty it becomes a part-time job, and every typo is a parcel sent to the wrong house.

Barcodes and EANs: boring, and essential

An EAN is the barcode number that identifies a specific product, in a specific size and variant, across the whole retail world. Inside your own shop you can get away without one. On marketplaces you usually cannot. Most of them match your listing to an existing product page using the barcode, and will either reject a listing without one or bury it.

The good news is that branded stock from a distributor almost always carries the manufacturer's EAN already, and it is often sitting in the supplier feed. Make sure your shop stores it against every product and variant from day one. It is far easier to capture now than to backfill across thousands of listings later.

Expanding to eBay, OnBuy and other marketplaces

Once your catalogue, stock and pricing are clean, marketplaces become a second shop window for the same products. eBay and OnBuy are natural fits for beauty, fragrance and homeware, and a properly built setup lets one stock pool feed every channel, so a sale on a marketplace reduces what your own site shows and nothing gets oversold.

The catch is the fee maths. Marketplaces typically take a percentage of the sale, sometimes plus a fixed fee per order, and the percentage is often charged on the total including delivery and VAT. A margin that looks healthy on your own site can shrink to almost nothing once those come off. Here is a made-up example to show the shape of it, not any marketplace's real fees:

  • A product costs you £10 from the supplier and you sell it for £20 on your own site.
  • Put the same £20 price on a marketplace that takes a 12% cut of the total, and £2.40 goes before VAT and postage are even counted.
  • Add the supplier's per-order delivery charge and payment costs, and your profit can halve.

So your pricing rules should know which channel they are pricing for. A sensible setup applies a separate marketplace margin that builds in the fee, so every channel protects your profit rather than just your turnover. For a broader look at what platforms take out of each sale, our piece on what bookings and payments really cost covers the same thinking from a different angle.

The gotchas nobody warns you about

Most problems with supplier-stock shops are not dramatic. They are settings, buried a few menus deep, that quietly undo the hard work. A few we see again and again:

  • The whole store shows as sold out. The stock sync is working perfectly and the numbers are right in the admin, yet every product page says unavailable. The culprit is often the platform's shipping-zone or location settings: if the stock is assigned to a location that is not set up to fulfil online orders, or the customer's country has no shipping zone, the shop treats everything as out of stock. Nothing is wrong with the feed at all.
  • Duplicate products. If the sync matches products by name rather than by SKU or EAN, a small change in the supplier's description can create a second copy of the product instead of updating the first.
  • Rounding that eats margin. A pricing rule that rounds down to the nearest .99 costs pennies per product, and pennies across thousands of lines add up.
  • Copied descriptions. Supplier copy is shared by every retailer who stocks the range. Using it word for word does nothing for your search visibility, so it is worth rewriting at least your best sellers.

Managed build or DIY apps and plugins?

You can absolutely assemble this yourself. Most ecommerce platforms have apps or plugins for feed imports, pricing rules, order forwarding and marketplace listings. For a small catalogue with one supplier, that can be the right call.

The trouble starts as you grow. Four or five apps from different developers, each with its own monthly fee and its own idea of which product is which, rarely agree with each other. When something breaks, every vendor points at another one. And the logic that runs your business, your margins and your rules, sits inside tools you do not control.

A managed build puts the sync, pricing, order flow and marketplace connections into one joined-up system, built around your supplier's actual feed and your actual margins, with someone responsible for keeping it running. If you trade at volume or with more than one supplier, it is usually the calmer option. If you are a distributor yourself rather than a retailer, our guide to what a wholesale merchant website costs is the better read.

Frequently asked questions

How often should stock sync from my supplier?

As often as the supplier's feed allows, and several times a day for popular lines. A small safety buffer on low stock levels helps cover the gap between syncs.

Do I need EANs to sell on marketplaces?

Usually, yes. Most marketplaces use the barcode to match your listing to the right product. Branded stock normally has one already, so the job is making sure your shop stores it for every product and variant.

Why does my shop say everything is sold out when the stock numbers are right?

Check your platform's shipping zones and stock locations first. If stock sits at a location that does not fulfil online orders, or a customer's region has no shipping zone, the shop can show products as unavailable even though the sync is working.

Should my marketplace prices match my website prices?

Not necessarily. Marketplace fees come out of each sale, so many retailers set a separate margin for each channel. The aim is the same profit per sale, not the same price tag.

Want it built and looked after for you?

Pixel & Shovel builds and fully manages online shops that run on supplier stock: the feed, the pricing rules, the order flow to your supplier and the marketplace connections, all in one system that we keep running. Tell us about your supplier and your range and we will come back with a straight recommendation and a fixed price.