Once orders come from several places (your site, Amazon, TikTok, Walmart, wholesale), operations is the job of making sure every order ships, every product has one identity, and stock never surprises you.
What happened at Lezzet
One barcode, two listings, one stock pool. We had two Amazon listings for the same Cardamom bag. Both used the manufacturer barcode, so Amazon treated them as the same item and pooled their stock. Plans to "let one listing sell out" could never work. We closed the duplicate.
Mismatched product codes made duplicates. Our shipping software (Veeqo) links orders to products by SKU, the product code. The first time a bag went into Amazon's warehouse, its Amazon SKU didn't match the website's, so the software created a second copy of the product. Orders then failed to route. The fix: create every product in Shopify first, and use the same SKU on every channel.
The shipping website glitched. The API didn't. Building Amazon warehouse shipments through the Send to Amazon website kept mixing up options. We switched to a small script that prices every warehouse placement, picks the cheapest total, and buys the UPS labels. It cost about $0.41 a bag to split one shipment across five warehouses.
Out-of-stock pages stay up. Sold-out products stay listed and indexed, so search rankings and reviews survive until the restock.
The setup that works
- One catalog source. Shopify holds every product, price, and SKU. Everything else syncs from it.
- One SKU per product, everywhere. Same code on Shopify, Amazon, TikTok, and in your shipping software.
- One shipping hub. Software that pulls orders from every channel and buys labels in one place.
- Written box specs. Units per box, box size, and weight for every product, so a warehouse shipment takes minutes.
- Restock alerts. Days of stock left per product per channel, checked daily.
What to watch out for
- Shipments to Amazon's storage program instead of its warehouses. Amazon may pre-select it. Read every option before confirming.
- Prep and labeling fees. Using the manufacturer barcode and no prep, where allowed, avoids per-unit charges.
- Stock counts in the wrong system. Decide which system's stock number is real, and ignore the others.
What bites you later
- Duplicate listings split your reviews and sales history, and you can't easily merge them later.
- Undocumented steps. When the person who ships is sick, nobody else knows how. Write the steps down once.