Selling Everywhere with Unified Inventory

Modern commerce has a funny way of sneaking up on people. One day you are selling a clever gadget out of your garage. The next day you are on Shopify, Amazon, Walmart, TikTok Shop, and some boutique retailer that found you on social media.

Orders start arriving from five directions at once. Your inventory, on the other hand, starts behaving like a neighborhood cat that may or may not come home. The pattern has become so common that search trends tell the story in bright colors. Brands spread across marketplaces, but their inventory stays stuck in silos. The internet created infinite shelves. It also created infinite headaches.

This is where the idea of selling everywhere but shipping from one unified system stops sounding like a buzzword and starts feeling like a lifeline.

When your sales channels multiply faster than your warehouse can blink

Let us talk about what actually hurts when your D2C, retail, wholesale, and marketplace operations run from separate stock pools. When each channel lives in its own little universe, the most common problems are predictable and painful.

First, there is overselling. Marketplaces tell customers an item is in stock. Your warehouse disagrees. The customer gets the email nobody wants to read. Retailers penalize you. Amazon can hurt your rankings or your visibility.

Second, you get stranded inventory. Maybe you have 600 units in your D2C warehouse but your Target orders are waiting on 200 units you are sure you already bought. Those units are probably buried in the wrong facility, the wrong system, or the wrong cost center.

Third, the cost of safety stock starts to grow. Each channel starts hoarding its own pile of extra product because nothing is talking to anything else. You did not mean to turn your cash flow into a museum of untouched cartons, but here we are.

Fourth, forecasting collapses. If your true inventory is scattered across spreadsheets, disconnected systems, and maybe a whiteboard your operations manager treats like a sacred text, every purchasing decision becomes a guessing game.

No surprise that so many brands bounce from one fulfillment setup to another. They are running from chaos, not toward strategy.

The promise of selling everywhere but shipping from one source of truth

Centralizing inventory across channels is not just about tidiness. It is about economics.

A unified inventory system is a single brain calling the shots. Shopify orders pull from the same pool that Target purchase orders pull from. Walmart requests do not fight Amazon requests for stock. Your wholesale obligations can be planned around your D2C spikes. You stop playing musical chairs with cartons.

This type of system can help reduce safety stock, cut stockouts, and tighten cash flow. You stop ordering more than you need. You stop apologizing to customers for what your warehouse never actually lost, but your systems misplaced.

G10 Director of Operations, Holly Woods, puts it simply: "Our omni-channel capabilities allow a lot more flexibility for our customers to pivot between D2C or B2B. You do not have to have all these separate integrations. It all just comes together. It is more stable, more efficient, more cost-effective having the omni-channel setup versus having everything separated out."

Omni-channel is becoming a survival skill

Search data and retail forecasts agree. Consumers do not shop in a straight line. They might find you on TikTok, compare you on Amazon, order on Shopify, and then return an item through a retailer that carries your brand. To them, your channels are not separate. They are the same store wearing different coats.

Retailers know this too. Walmart and Target now expect brands to deliver fast, accurate, compliant shipments across multiple fulfillment models. Amazon expects accuracy that brushes against 100 percent for inbound compliance. Falling short can bury a brand in fines and lower rankings.

Brands that cannot sync their channels fall behind. Brands that can unify inventory and fulfillment across channels start playing a different game.

Each channel wants something different

D2C is box-by-box speed. Retail is pallet-by-pallet compliance. Marketplaces are label-by-label precision. Wholesale is planning-by-the-month. Each channel behaves like a different creature with different demands.

When these channels are stitched together by hand, you spend your life firefighting. When they run through unified inventory and a single fulfillment stack, something rare happens: the chaos becomes manageable.

G10 VP of Customer Experience, Joel Malmquist, sees this shift all the time: "With an up-and-coming business, I am going to ask you questions. What channels are you trying to get into? How do you see your business growing? How can we help you get there? As you grow into more retailers, we can help split or distribute your inventory across the country to make sure you are closer to the distribution centers for those retailers."

That kind of cross-channel lift is very hard to pull off without one unified operational backbone underneath it.

Unified inventory as protection from retail penalties

Retailers have strict rules. Not suggestions. Rules.

Target routing timelines can close a door on you with no second chance. Walmart labeling requirements can feel like learning a new alphabet. Amazon fines brands for small mistakes. It is not personal. It is protocol.

One bad shipment can cost thousands in chargebacks. A pattern of bad shipments can end a relationship entirely.

This is where unified inventory ties into unified execution. Consistency depends on clear data. Clear data depends on a single inventory source.

G10 CTO and COO, Bryan Wright, explains it this way: "Our WMS system was written from day one around B2B. If a customer has a Walmart account they are trying to bring on, we can turn on the integration, create the Walmart-specific shipping label, send them the Walmart-specific EDI transaction, and pick it in a specific way for Walmart. All of that is inherent in the software."

When your inventory and fulfillment run from one brain, compliance stops being a guessing game.

What happens when growth hits in three channels at once

Ask any fast-growing brand what broke first, and they will tell you: the moment sales spike in one channel, the other channels suffer.

Your Shopify store goes viral. Suddenly you are out of stock on Amazon. Then your Target purchase order arrives and there is not enough inventory to fulfill it. Each channel blames the other because the inventory never lived in a single source.

G10 Director of Fulfillment, Connor Perkins, sees this pattern during onboarding. "Onboarding a client who does both D2C and B2B involves a lot of integration. Maybe they want us to integrate directly with their ERP system, or directly with Amazon or Walmart. Our integration developers are well-versed in omni-channel fulfillment and integration systems. We are capable of doing any EDI, API, flat file, XML, any type of integration needed throughout the omni-channel for the marketplaces out there."

Growth does not have to feel like a catastrophe. Unified inventory keeps spikes in one channel from knocking others over.

Unified inventory turns speed into a habit

Modern shoppers expect real speed, not symbolic speed.

That means same-day fulfillment, two-day transit, carrier rate shopping, smart warehouse placement, and inventory accuracy that hovers near perfection. These expectations were set by Amazon, and now everyone else is living in the world Amazon built.

To meet those expectations, your inventory cannot be divided into little fiefdoms. It has to behave like one cohesive system.

Maureen Milligan, G10 Director of Operations and Projects, explains what visibility means for brands: "What these real-time portals provide our customers is 100 percent visibility. They can watch their orders move through the stages of the fulfillment process. They do not have to wait until we send them a notification that the order is fulfilled. They can actually watch those progressions going on."

Visibility is not a perk. It is the difference between reacting and predicting.

Why founders with grit benefit most from unified systems

Founders are builders. They are scrappy, clever, and allergic to losing momentum. They do not want to babysit five different inventory pools. They want a growth engine that does not wobble every time they sign a new retailer.

G10 founder and CEO, Mark Becker, sees this dynamic constantly: "The guy that we are a great fit for is already established on his own website. He is doing pretty darn good on it. He is doing good enough that he is having talks with Target and Walmart, or he is already in one of them. That is probably the ideal customer profile."

Scaling is a different sport from startup scrappiness. Unified inventory is one of the tools that helps make that leap without breaking operations.

How unified inventory helps earn long-term trust

Trust is not something you can claim. It is something you earn one shipment at a time.

Brands enter new 3PL relationships with scars: inventory lost, orders delayed, labels wrong, systems opaque. They come in with skepticism because they have lived the other side.

Maureen Milligan sees the emotional shift: "Most of the customers who come to us from another 3PL, their challenges have always been access to their data, order accuracy and efficiency, and just meeting the committed requirements. Customers who have come to us from a bad 3PL relationship experience relief. They are suddenly seeing their business scaling. They see that the data supports what we agreed to, and then the trust begins to build."

Unified inventory is not just a technical feature. It is how you show customers that you are not improvising. You are operating from a single, reliable truth.

Why G10 leans so hard into omni-channel capability

Many 3PLs started by accident. They had their own brands, their own warehouses, and extra space. They began renting it out, bolted on generic software, and hoped it could stretch to fit every new client that walked in the door.

G10 took a different route. The warehouse management system here was designed by someone who had spent years in the WMS world, then commercialized that software and kept improving it. The result is a platform built for B2B complexity, extended to handle D2C and marketplace demands without breaking.

Chief Marketing Officer, Jen Myers, describes it this way: "Sometimes companies become 3PLs by accident. They start renting space, license some software, and it is not customized, so it is hard to react to customer needs. Compare that with G10, where we have people like Bryan Wright, who actually developed the WMS software, and has his people with him too, so he can just go in and do whatever he wants. As customers come up with specialized needs, we can make it happen. That is why omni-channel is pretty seamless for us, because we built it that way."

The bottom line: selling everywhere needs a single source of truth

Commerce is not getting simpler. Channels are multiplying. Customer expectations are rising. Retailers are demanding. Algorithms are unforgiving.

The brands that survive are the ones that stop treating inventory like a guessing game. They use unified systems, unified fulfillment, unified data, and unified accountability.

Selling everywhere works only when your inventory lives in one place with one plan.

Ready for the next step

If your business is stretching across D2C, retailers, wholesalers, or marketplaces, and your inventory is starting to feel like a well-meaning but unreliable roommate, it may be time to centralize.

G10 helps brands move from channel chaos to channel confidence. If you want to explore how unified inventory could work for your business, reach out. Let us talk about where you are going next, and how to build the operational engine that can actually take you there.