Inventory Tracking for E-Commerce: How to Keep Fast Sales From Turning Into Fulfillment Chaos

E-commerce rewards speed, but speed punishes sloppy inventory. When your inventory tracking lags behind reality, your storefront keeps selling items that are already gone, and your warehouse scrambles to make the numbers work. Customers see backorders and cancellations. Retailers see shorts and chargebacks. Your team sees a never-ending stream of tickets. Inventory tracking for e-commerce is not a back-office detail. It is the system that protects revenue and reputation when order volume spikes.

Most brands feel the pain in a familiar sequence. First, you scale marketing and sales. Then, orders surge, and inventory gets harder to manage. Then, you start noticing that the system count and the shelf count do not match. That is when the business starts making bad decisions based on bad data: overbuying for buffers, pausing campaigns unnecessarily, or promising delivery windows that the warehouse cannot actually hit. The fix is not heroics. The fix is tracking that stays current while inventory moves.

Why e-commerce inventory breaks faster than retail teams expect

E-commerce inventory breaks quickly because demand updates instantly and continuously. Your store is checking availability all day. Marketplaces are checking availability all day. If your warehouse system updates inventory in batches, or only at a few checkpoints, your channels will sell against stale information.

Bryan Wright, CTO and COO of G10 Fulfillment, described the standard that prevents this: "A good WMS tracks inventory through the warehouse at every point that you touch it." The important part is every point. Receiving, staging, putaway, replenishment, picking, packing, transfers, and returns all change inventory reality. If the system does not capture those changes in real time, the storefront is operating on a delayed version of the truth.

This gets worse during promotions and peak season because the number of touches increases. A bestseller might be replenished multiple times a day. A non-scan move that feels harmless in a quiet week becomes an oversell trigger in a busy week.

Scan-based tracking is the baseline for e-commerce accuracy

E-commerce inventory tracking only works when warehouse work is captured at the moment it happens. That is why scan discipline matters. If people move product without scanning it, the system cannot update inventory, and your channels will oversell.

Connor Perkins, Director of Fulfillment at G10 Fulfillment, described the baseline clearly: "You want everything to be scanned in the warehouse, nothing done on paper." Paper creates invisible work. Invisible work creates missing transactions. Missing transactions create inventory drift, and drift shows up as cancellations and refunds that e-commerce customers remember.

Connor also described the financial consequence brands experience when accuracy breaks down. They were "losing money by shipping wrong items or wrong quantities of items." Wrong shipments create a double cost in e-commerce: the cost of the product mistake and the cost of the customer who does not return.

Real time visibility keeps marketing and operations aligned

In e-commerce, marketing and operations are joined at the hip, whether they like it or not. Marketing runs promotions based on inventory availability. Operations must fulfill the demand. If inventory visibility is weak, marketing sells what operations cannot ship, and everyone loses.

Maureen Milligan, Director of Operations and Projects at G10 Fulfillment, described what good visibility provides customers: "What these real-time portals provide our customers is 100% visibility." She also described the practical benefit: "They can actually watch those progressions going on." In e-commerce, that matters because brands need to see order flow, fulfillment status, and inventory changes in real time, not as an end-of-day summary.

When visibility is accurate, marketing can plan around real availability, and operations can execute without constant escalation. That is how you scale campaigns without scaling chaos.

Location tracking prevents the classic "it is in the building somewhere" problem

One of the most common e-commerce failures is inventory that exists but cannot be found quickly. The system says it is on hand, but it is in the wrong place, or it is stuck in staging, or it was moved without an update. From the customer perspective, it might as well be out of stock.

Bryan gave a vivid example of what strong location visibility looks like: "At any point in time, I know that Bobby has this product on fork 10 right now, and if I needed to go find that product, I just got to go find Bobby on fork 10." That is what it means to track inventory through movement, not just through storage. For e-commerce, that difference can be the difference between hitting a same-day cutoff and missing it.

Location tracking also supports faster picking. When pickers trust the system, they spend less time hunting and more time shipping, which is what customers want.

Omnichannel pressure makes e-commerce tracking non-negotiable

Many e-commerce brands expand into additional channels: Amazon, retail, wholesale, marketplaces, and pop-up inventory flows. Each channel introduces new rules and new failure modes. If inventory tracking is not unified and real time, channels compete for the same units, and you end up disappointing someone.

Jen Myers, Chief Marketing Officer at G10 Fulfillment, described the multi-channel reality: "You want to make sure your inventory is tracked across those two different systems, to make sure that there's enough inventory." That is the core omnichannel question, and it is also the core e-commerce question. Do you know what is actually available right now, across all commitments.

Inventory tracking for e-commerce becomes more valuable as channel complexity rises because it reduces the risk of overselling across platforms and missing retailer service requirements.

Ship accuracy protects customer experience when volume spikes

E-commerce customers tend to forgive a slow shipment once. They do not forgive receiving the wrong item, because wrong items create friction: returns, replacements, wasted time, and loss of confidence. Inventory tracking supports ship accuracy by keeping pick locations clean and by enabling scan verification at pick and pack.

Joel Malmquist, VP of Customer Experience at G10 Fulfillment, described the performance level that disciplined execution can achieve: "We have over 99.9% ship accuracy of these orders." That kind of accuracy is what keeps e-commerce customer experience stable during peak volume, when mistakes are most likely to happen.

How to evaluate inventory tracking for e-commerce when choosing a 3PL

Ask how the 3PL captures transactions. Is the operation fully scan-based. Are internal moves and replenishment scanned, or only receiving and shipping. Does the portal show inventory by status, location, and allocation. Can the provider show transaction history when a discrepancy arises.

Strong tracking should be provable. Bryan described the traceability that makes troubleshooting possible: "We have portals that show you the data. We have history that shows you all of that tracking." If a provider can show that history, your e-commerce team spends less time chasing answers and more time selling confidently.

How G10 supports inventory tracking for e-commerce

G10 focuses on scan-based execution, transaction-level tracking, and customer-facing visibility so e-commerce inventory stays aligned with reality even when volume spikes. Connor summarized the baseline: "Having a 3PL and WMS that is 100% scan-based is crucial." Bryan described the tracking foundation behind that baseline: "A good WMS tracks inventory through the warehouse at every point that you touch it." Maureen connected visibility to customer confidence: "What these real-time portals provide our customers is 100% visibility."

If you want to scale e-commerce without the constant fear of overselling, inventory tracking is where you start. When stock updates reflect real warehouse work in real time, your storefront stops making promises your operation cannot keep, and fulfillment becomes a growth engine instead of a daily stress test.