It is so annoying!

After all, you pay for software that supposes to accurately sync the stock level of your products, and yet sometimes you find products being set out of stock in DSM Tool but in stock from your supplier.

So what causes sync issues and what can you do about it?

For dropshipping software like DSM Tool, syncing the information between the website you use as a supplier and your eBay store requires using a technology that is called "crawling".

We use the crawlers in order to index the information of the product such as its price and stock level from the retailer into our database. This is similar to how Google is indexing the world wide web using crawlers to their search engine databases.

The problem is that unlike Google, small software companies like ours are facing constant changes and challenges from the crawled websites that crawlers to fail. Moreover, maintenance can sometimes take days to fix them.

Let's use an illustration to explain how it can happen: every time Google wants to make a change in how their crawlers work they simply announce it and the entire worldwide web complies immediately. It happens because everyone wants to be first in Google's search result, and that requires to comply with Google's search engine crawling updates.

Software companies like DSM Tool face the opposite situation - every time a retailer changes their website structure we have to adapt our crawlers to the change. And it always happens in delay because the retailers don't announce their upcoming structure updates, we can't know when it will happen. In other words - we constantly work on fixing the scanners because retailers constantly update their websites with infrastructure changes and improvements.

This means that no software is able to provide 100% accurate scanning 100% of the time. Every new issue that comes up goes into a queue waiting to be solved, and that takes time and depends on the change that the retailer has done - some issues require from us long and complicated adaptions.

When the crawlers that update price and stock are malfunctions due to the reasons explained above the information that is already indexed in our databases might become outdated and might be wrong.

For example, the price of a product on Amazon or Ali Express can raise by 50% and the scanning system would not be able to detect it.

In 2018, together with some of the most experienced sellers that use DSM Tool we decided that the best defense mechanism for these situations is to set products that cannot be scanned out of stock in order to protect your seller account from getting harmed.

While we're constantly looking into new technologies that will make product information indexation more simple and stable, at the moment such technology doesn't exist. But you can help us adapt faster to the changes.

The best way for you to help is by providing as accurate and as detailed as possible a description of the problem you encounter to the customer support team via the chat support system at the bottom right corner of the screen.

The team is trained to research and report every new issue that comes up to the tech team. We have a team that is dedicated only to updating our crawlers and maintaining them and sometimes it only takes a few minutes or a few hours to update the crawlers and adapt them to the changes.

Yet, with a few years of experience in crawling data, we've seen issues that take days or even weeks to solve because they require a fundamental change in the way we use the crawlers.

Another common reason for problems in price syncing is happening on the other end of the scanning process: your store.

When the source of the price and stock sync issue is your store, typically an error message would be received from your eBay or Shopify account and appear as a big red banner in the top menu with the text "REPRICING ERROR"

The most common errors and how to fix them appears in the repricing errors guide.

If you find an error that does not exist in the guide report it might be a new type of error that we did not encounter before. Report it to the support team so we could add it to the guide.