Glossary
Overselling
Definition
Accepting an order for stock you cannot ship, usually because more than one channel held its own idea of how much was available.
The visible cost is the cancelled order. The larger cost is the marketplace performance metric that a seller-initiated cancellation feeds, which affects listing visibility long after the order is forgotten.
The structural fixes are one stock ledger, stock reserved at order confirmation rather than at dispatch, and small buffers on fast-moving SKUs.
Related terms
- Safety stockStock deliberately held back and not advertised, to absorb demand spikes and the lag between a sale and every channel learning about it.
- StockoutHaving nothing available to sell of a SKU that customers are actively trying to buy.
- Inventory ledgerA record of every stock movement — sale, return, adjustment, transfer, receipt — from which the current quantity is derived rather than stored.