Manage Marketplace Fulfilment Without Losing Stock Control

Placing stock with marketplace fulfilment is a good decision for a lot of SKUs. It puts inventory close to demand, it earns the visibility and delivery promise those channels offer, and it takes packing volume off your own bench on your busiest days. The problem is rarely the choice. It is that once cartons leave your warehouse, many sellers stop counting them, and a fortnight later nobody can say how many units of a SKU the business actually owns.

The fix is not to send less. It is to run the mix deliberately and keep one number for total stock.

Decide the Mix SKU by SKU, Not Channel by Channel

Forward placement suits some SKUs much better than others. Work through your catalogue against four tests.

●        Velocity and stability. A SKU that sells steadily every week is a good candidate. A SKU that sells in unpredictable bursts ties up units in a location you cannot redirect from.

●        Cover days at each location. Decide how many days of expected sales you want sitting at a fulfilment centre. Two to four weeks of cover is a common working range; anything much beyond that is cash parked away from you.

●        Value density and shelf life. High-value or short-dated goods are better held where you can move them to whichever channel is actually selling them.

●        Newness. A SKU launched three weeks ago has no reliable demand signal. Hold new lines centrally until you have enough weeks of data to place them sensibly.

Write the decision down as a rule, not a mood: "top 20 SKUs by units, three weeks of cover at each FC, everything else ships from our own warehouse." Then review it monthly against actual sell-through rather than re-arguing it every despatch.

Preparing an Inbound Consignment

An inbound to a fulfilment centre is a B2B freight movement, not a set of parcels. Several shipments to one recipient group under a single order, each carrying its own 9-digit Lorry Receipt Number, with your own Order ID over the whole consignment. Delhivery's B2B cargo covers this movement, with appointment scheduling handled alongside the order rather than in a separate thread.

The preparation is exacting, and that is a good thing: receiving errors are almost always preventable at the packing bench. Refer to the graphic below for key steps required to prepare an inbound consignment to a fulfilment centre.

Keep One View of Total Stock

This is the part that decides whether the mix works. Your stock does not become someone else's the moment it leaves your dock; it becomes stock of yours in a different location, in one of three states: at your warehouse, in transit, or received and sellable at a fulfilment centre.

Hold a single sheet with a row per SKU and a column per state. Update it on two triggers: when a consignment dispatches and when it is confirmed received. Reconcile weekly against the receiving reports from each channel and against your own dispatch manifest, and investigate any gap within the week rather than at month end, when nobody remembers the consignment.

Two habits make the reconciliation quick. Keep the carton manifest for every inbound, and record the LRN and the appointment date against the consignment so a query has a reference. Channel integrations across your website and marketplace accounts pull orders into one queue, so you can set total demand against total owned stock instead of reading each channel's dashboard separately and adding them up in your head. Reports on dispatched and delivered consignments give you the movement side of the same picture.

Hold Enough Back to Serve Your Own Channels

The stock you keep is what lets you serve your website, your social channels and any trade or offline demand, and it is what gives you room to move when one channel suddenly sells faster than another.

Set an explicit floor: a minimum number of units per SKU that never leaves your own warehouse, sized on your own channels' weekly sales plus a buffer. Enforce it in the inbound planning step, so a large replenishment to a fulfilment centre cannot quietly empty the shelf your own orders ship from. Plan inbound consignments on a cycle, fortnightly or monthly per location, rather than reacting to a low-stock alert, and size each one against cover days rather than sending whatever is on the floor.

What You Can Do?

●        Classify your top 30 SKUs against the four tests and write the placement rule for each.

●        Set cover days per fulfilment location and a minimum hold-back quantity per SKU for your own channels.

●        Build the one-sheet stock view with columns for own warehouse, in transit, received per location, and reserved.

●        Standardise your inbound carton manifest template and start keeping a copy of every one.

●        Put your next inbound on a booked appointment with the LRN and appointment date recorded against the consignment, and reconcile receipt against your manifest within a week.

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