2,000 orders a day, nobody typing.

There's a moment in every growing e-commerce operation when the thing that got you here stops working. Usually it looks like this: someone in the office spends their morning copying orders from marketplace dashboards into the ERP, someone else adjusts stock numbers across three websites by hand, and everyone has quietly accepted that Monday is "catch-up day".

It works at 50 orders a day. It strains at 200. At 500 it produces the two failure modes that actually kill marketplace businesses: overselling (stock you've already sold elsewhere) and late dispatch (metrics slip, the marketplace buries your listings, the algorithm never forgives). Nobody decided to run the business this way. It accreted.

What integration actually covers

"Connect the marketplaces to the ERP" sounds like one job. It's five, and skipping any of them is why half-done integrations disappoint:

• Goods in — stock truth starts at the warehouse door, not on the website. Bulk supplier deliveries are booked in against their purchase orders and scanned into the warehouse system on arrival — so the quantity every channel sells against is real from the first minute.
• Orders in — every channel's orders land in the ERP automatically, correctly mapped: customer, items, taxes, delivery service. No keying, no Monday.
• Stock out — one stock truth, pushed to every channel as it changes. This is the one that stops overselling, and it has to be near-real-time, because a weekend promotion can empty a stock line in an hour.
• Dispatch back — every outgoing parcel scanned, with tracking numbers flowing back to each marketplace the moment goods ship, keeping your seller metrics — and therefore your visibility — healthy.
• Pricing and listings — new products and price changes flow outward from one master, not retyped into five dashboards.

What it made possible

We built exactly this for a footwear operation that had just acquired a new brand and wanted a high-volume, multi-channel model. Linnworks managed the marketplace channels — Amazon, eBay and the daily-deal platforms Wowcher and Groupon, where a single promotion can land thousands of orders in a day — integrated with the ERP. On the warehouse side, a WMS and barcode-scanning system, delivered with a specialist partner, mapped every incoming and outgoing item: bulk supplier deliveries booked in against purchase orders, single customer orders scanned out the door.

The result was an operation running at 1,500–2,000 orders a day across five countries, at 99.8% data accuracy, with 100+ hours a week of manual processing eliminated. The staff who'd been typing orders went back to doing things that grow a business. And daily-deal volume — impossible to survive manually — became just another channel.

The measure that matters

Notice which number matters most: not the order count, the accuracy. At 2,000 orders a day, 95% accuracy means a hundred problems every single day — refunds, complaints, support tickets, marketplace penalties. 99.8% means four. Integration isn't about speed first; it's about being able to trust the numbers at speed.

How to know you're ready

• Anyone in your business retypes order or stock data between systems, on any schedule
• You've oversold during a promotion, or throttled marketing because operations couldn't cope
• You want a marketplace or daily-deal channel but the volume spike scares you
• Your "stock accuracy" depends on one person who knows where the bodies are buried

Any one of these is the signal. All four means the integration pays for itself embarrassingly fast.