Inventory Management Overview

Currently, only users who are part of our Dealer Program may opt-in to using our API, or have inventory management enabled for their account. Once your account is enabled, you will be able to navigate to Dashboard > Inventory Management to choose your settings, and access your credentials.

As part of Inventory Management, you may enable features to automate listing creation, order syncing and tracking notifications.

During development, we can provision your Audiogon account on our staging site to send sample inventory and test order handling.

Inventory Management Considerations

There are several considerations you should understand before beginning to develop, or making your switch to, Inventory Management.

Inventory Managed Listings Are Treated Differently

Whereas a listing created manually or through our Bulk Uploader can only have one order associated with it (i.e. Someone bought the listing so it isn't available anymore), Inventory Managed listings support multiple orders for one listing, as they are essentially treated as products.

"Sold" listings will no longer populate under the Sold listing tab, but rather in a separate "Orders" tab in your Seller Dashboard.

Manually Created Listings Are Not Included in Workflow

Listings that are created manually or through the Bulk Uploader are exempt from Inventory Managed workflows—updating, order syncing, etc.—as they do not have a mapped listing ID to your feed file. To avoid issues, only use your Inventory Feed.

Before enabling Inventory Management, you may want to either end all active listings or only add items to your feed once they naturally expire/sell. The latter option would allow you to keep any active offers or conversations with a potential buyer. 

Removing an Item From The Feed Doesn't Remove It From The Site

Removing an item from your feed does not remove it from Audiogon. The listing will remain active until it expires. You will still receive offers and orders.

Quantity Can Be Used for Out-of-Stock Items

Setting a product quantity to 0 treats the listing as "Out-of-Stock." This means that the listing will remain active but a user cannot purchase the item. The "Buy It Now" button is replaced with a "Contact Dealer" button to send a message.

Quantity Can Be Used to End Listing Immediately

Setting a product quantity to -1 will immediately force close any active listing of the product.

How Default Listing Preferences Work in Conjunction with IM

While we only require 7 fields in an Inventory Management Feed, there are many others that are optional. We encourage you to explicitly provide values for relevant, optional fields, as this makes the settings listing-specific. However, you may opt to have them handled universally via Default Listing Preferences, such as Allowing Offers, Shipping Options, and Accepted Payment Methods.

Example: You only ship to the United States. Instead of including the "shipTo" field and supplying a "US" value on every item in your feed, you could simply omit the "shipTo" field and select United States in your Default Listing preferences. Your Inventory Managed items will inherit that value.

We will defer to your Default Listing Preferences on omitted fields.

Order Status and Allocation

Audiogon is unique in that users commit to buy an item, and are then taken to their cart to pay. 

This means that when a buyer commits to buy an item we create an order with the status of `open`, and update it to `paid` when they complete checkout. Most buyers pay immediately, but there may be a delay due to a need to discuss logistics or other details with you.

You will need to think through how this may affect your shipping process and allocation, especially if you sell an item across several marketplaces or are low on inventory. If you offer Direct Sale options as payment methods, please refer to Inventory Management Orders & Updating Status.

For instance, ShipStation does not allow allocation (decreasing quantity by 1) or shipping labels to be created until the order is `paid`. If there were a delay in payment on an item with quantity 1 would you want to allocate that item to the buyer before payment and risk overselling? Or will you just inform the buyer that the item is no longer in stock—even if someone purchased it after them on a different platform?