Your dashboard and your shelf agree.
Tracked from goods-in to dispatch, down to batch and expiry.
Waypoint 3PL manages stock for online retailers from our warehouse in Essex. Every unit is tracked from the moment it arrives to the moment it leaves, and the count is synced live across every channel you sell on.
Poor stock visibility is behind most of the fulfilment problems retailers actually notice: overselling on a channel that had not caught up, running out of a fast-moving line with no warning, or hearing about a discrepancy first from a customer. This page covers how we avoid all three.
What is outsourced stock management?
Handing the counting to the people already handling the boxes.
Outsourced stock management means the day-to-day tracking, counting and organising of your inventory is done by your fulfilment partner, rather than by you in a spreadsheet or a standalone system. It sits alongside warehousing and pick and pack inside a full eCommerce fulfilment service - stock has to be tracked accurately before it can be picked accurately.
How our inventory management service works.
The count is not maintained. It is a side effect of the work.
There is no reconciliation step where somebody sits down and squares a spreadsheet against the shelf, because there is nothing to square: every physical event writes to the count as it happens, and that count is what your store sees.
Goods-in
Counted onto the racking within 24 hours, against the delivery note.
Putaway
Each SKU lands in a known location, with its batch and expiry recorded.
Pick
Scanned off the shelf against the order. The count moves as the item does.
Pack
Checked against the order before the box is sealed, so a mis-pick is caught here.
Dispatch
The allocation settles into a real deduction the moment the parcel leaves.
Return
Inspected, graded, and put back into sellable stock within 24 hours.
You see the same figures we work from, in the customer portal and pushed back into your store.
How inventory management works for online retailers.
Four questions, and a count that has to answer all of them at once.
How much have I actually got? A figure that was right on Monday is a guess by Thursday if nothing updates it in between. Ours updates at the moment stock moves, not on a schedule.
Does every channel agree? Without a live sync, a sale on one storefront does not reach the others quickly enough - and two customers buy the last unit within minutes of each other.
Is the oldest stock going out first? Without batch and expiry tracking, newer deliveries sit in front of older ones and short-dated stock quietly ages out behind them.
When do I reorder? A reorder point needs a real sell-through rate per line. Guessing it either ties cash up in stock that is not moving or runs a line out mid-campaign.
Outsourcing the tracking to a partner with live multichannel sync takes the manual guesswork out of the first three. The fourth stays a commercial decision - but it becomes one you can make on real sell-through figures instead of a feeling about how the month went.
Why outsource your stock management.
Because a count kept by hand is only as good as the last time somebody remembered.
Tracking inventory manually across a growing number of channels takes time that is better spent on the business, and it is exactly where small errors compound: a miscount in a spreadsheet is not caught when it is made, it is caught weeks later when an order cannot be fulfilled.
Handing it over ties the count to things that physically happen anyway - a delivery arriving, an item being picked, a parcel leaving - rather than to somebody remembering to update a file afterwards.
Multichannel and platform sync.
One pool of stock, however many places you sell it.
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Stock levels sync automatically with Shopify, Adobe Commerce and WooCommerce, and with custom stores and ERPs through our REST API - so selling in three places does not mean keeping three stock counts by hand.
Stock management, asked and answered.
What is outsourced stock management?
Outsourced stock management is handing the counting, tracking and organisation of your inventory to a fulfilment partner, rather than managing it yourself through spreadsheets or in-house software.
How is inventory tracked in real time?
Stock is scanned and updated at every touchpoint - goods-in, picking, packing and dispatch - and the count is synced live to your store rather than updated in batches.
Can inventory management prevent overselling across multiple channels?
Yes. Because stock levels sync automatically across every channel you sell on, a sale on one platform updates availability everywhere else immediately, which is what prevents overselling.
Do you support batch and expiry tracking?
Yes. Stock is tracked down to batch and expiry level. It matters most for date-sensitive or regulated products, but it is applied across every account.
Is inventory management included in fulfilment, or a separate service?
It is included as part of our fulfilment service rather than sold separately, because accurate stock tracking is what makes pick and pack accurate in the first place.
Get started with outsourced stock management.
Tell us what you are storing and how many channels you sell on, and we will show you how tracking would work for your account.