There is a significant concern and thought surrounding this topic. It is very important to IndieMade that we ensure that quantities are synced properly with Etsy but it does raise its own set of issues and problems we deal with.
Please note this only applies if you have 'Sync Quantity' checked on your Etsy Connect Settings page.
Updating quantities when inventory changes at IndieMade.
When a product sells on IndieMade or if you adjust the quantity manually.
IndieMade reliably updates the quantity on Etsy. This also works when quantities vary by variation the only difference is that we will also update the price per variation as well. Currently, we cannot avoid syncing the variation price. If you do not have variation price differences we will not update the Etsy listing price.
The Issue: When Etsy listing quantities change
When a product sells on Etsy or if you adjust the quantity manually at Etsy.
Etsy will attempt to notify us of this listing change through a feed. In these cases, Etsy uses a third-party service to send these notifications. However, these feeds have become unreliable over the past few years. We do log every request coming in so we can determine when this becomes an issue.
It is very important that you monitor your IndieMade stock levels when quantities change or sell out on Etsy.
What we can do to help fix this problem?
There are a few things we can try and we set these on a per-customer basis. We have a limited amount of requests to Etsy so we cannot continually query listings checks but we can try a few things to help. If you are having issues with quantities syncing from Etsy please reach out to IndieMade support. The following are tech support level settings:
Sync all quantities: We will send a request to Etsy to sync all quantities if the feeds are working, for the most part, this helps to fix minor quantity discrepancies.
Sync quantities on product view: Anytime a visitor visits a product page we make automatically sync listing quantities between Etsy and IndieMade. This will gradually keep the quantities synced and does not require too many requests to Etsy (the limit the number of hourly requests allowed).
Sync quantities on checkout: With this setting, we double-check and sync product quantities on listings during checkout. This does the obvious: prevents product sales on IndieMade that have sold out on Etsy.
These settings might become permanent for everyone syncing quantities at Etsy, depending on how Etsy decides to handle this problematic issue.
We hope that you can understand the complexity of this subject and appreciate your patience as we do our best to work with Etsy to resolve the issue and come up with a permanent solution.