You can use buffers to safely manage your inventory, eliminate overselling, and restrict the available quantity shown on your marketplaces.
What are maximum and minimum inventory buffers?
Review this article for more details and why you may want to use this.
- A Maximum Buffer (Max Visible) pushes the preset buffer quantity to the marketplace in place of your actual quantity.
- A Minimum Buffer (Min Threshold) is a preset buffer quantity that will ensure your inventory listing will be pulled from the marketplace when your quantity is below the established threshold or intentionally make your listing inactive on a specific marketplace.
You have the ability to set inventory buffers via the user interface and via a bulk upload: How do I add Maximum and Minimum inventory buffers to my listings?
The rest of this article provides examples of how to set min and max buffers via the Inventory API:
These are simple examples below of how to set buffers on a site level. Via the Inventory API that happens in the productsites array. This may be initially set via a POST call if the SKU and sales channel combination does not yet exist, and may be updated via a PUT call once it does.
This example is setting the minimum buffer to 10, so if your SKU has an actual quantity under 10, it will get sent as 0 to the site, and then a max buffer of 15, so if your SKU has an actual quantity over 15 will be sent as 15 to the site:
{
"SKU": "testsku",
"ProductSites": [
{
"Site": "eBay",
"MinThreshold": 10,
"MaxVisible": 15
}
]
}
If you don't want to use a max buffer, you may just leave it empty or just leave it out of the request entirely:
{
"SKU": "testsku",
"ProductSites": [
{
"Site": "eBay",
"MinThreshold": 10,
"MaxVisible":
}
]
}
{
"SKU": "testsku",
"ProductSites": [
{
"Site": "eBay",
"MinThreshold": 10
}
]
}
If you want to manage different levels of inventory per marketplace for a given SKU:
For example, a SKU "testSKU" has an actual global inventory level of quantity 15 but you'd like it to be published like below:
1. eBay = 10
2. Walmart = 5
3. NewEgg = 0
In this scenario, it could be accomplished with the example below. The NewEgg min threshold would have to be higher than 15 so you could set it to 16 or a much higher number like 1000. The min threshold is the lowest number Marketplace Management would send for that site. So if the min threshold was 15, we would send a 15 quantity but once it dropped below that, it would send a 0. (So in the case of the actual amount being 1000, if it was 1000 then we would send it as 1000, but anything under that would get sent as a 0.)
{
"SKU": "testsku",
"ProductSites": [
{
"Site": "eBay",
"MaxVisible": 10
}
{
"Site": "Walmart",
"MaxVisible": 5
}
{
"Site": "newegg",
"MinThreshold": 16,
}
]
}