The Oversell Avoidance feature allows a seller to define the sites where items should be automatically withdrawn if the inventory calculations determine that there is a potential oversell condition if all of the currently open listings were sold to buyers. You will still be responsible for any listing fees that are generated from the original listing of the item, but the item will be ended to prevent any further sales.

Please Note:  Oversell Avoidance has been superceded by the  Automatic Revise Listings functionality (launched early 2012) which can support any field for pricing information as well as revising all other fields on open listings.   The standalone Oversell Avoidance functionality will be removed in early 2013, and the Revise Listings functionality will function as the method to update existing open listings with updated information including removing quantity to avoid an oversell condition.  The new Revise Listings functionality is already available for you to use if you would like to enable it today.

When enabled, the Oversell Avoidance option will do the following:

• Monitor the available quantity of all inventory items
• If the available quantity becomes negative, it will look for open listings from the selected marketplace sites to recover quantity and restock the quantity into the inventory item.
• Repeats this process until the inventory quantity is non-negative or until there are no more open listings that can be adjusted.

Tasks to Complete

How to Enable Oversell Avoidance

Much of the functionality is automatic once enabled in your account.

1. Navigate to your    Marketplaces > eBay > Settings > eBay Settings   view
2. Select the   edit   link next to   listings   to configure the settings listed below. 
3. To enable the functionality, select the relevant marketplaces from the list and save the settings page.

Note: 

• The eBay marketplaces listed are those supported for the automatic withdraw function that are currently enabled in your account.  If a marketplace is not listed then it is either not enabled in your marketplace settings or it is not supported for the functionality.
• If you have no supported eBay marketplaces enabled, then a message will appear that no supported marketplaces are enabled in your account. 
• To use this feature to remove store and fixed price listings but leave auctions open regardless of the inventory quantity, only select the fixed price related options.
• Once selected, the automatic processing will begin in the background. You will not see changes to your screen.
• If there are any inventory items with an available quantity less than zero, they will be inspected in the next processing run to determine if they are linked to open listings from selected marketplaces. 
• To stop the automatic processing at any time, return to the settings page, un-check the box for that marketplace, and save the new settings.
• For all the SKU's open listings for the configured eBay Marketplaces, the system will withdraw or revise the listings with the longest remaining live time first.

How to Exclude Certain Inventory Items

The ability to exclude certain items from processing is now available.  In order to exclude some inventory items from the Oversell Avoidance and Price Synchronization processing, you just need to assign them to a label and instruct the Oversell Avoidance and Price Synchronization systems to ignore all inventory items that have the specified label assigned.  Once the label has been created, it will be available on the Oversell Avoidance settings to select for exclusion from Oversell Avoidance and Price Synchronization processing.  If no label has been selected then no inventory item will be excluded and all inventory items will process for Oversell Avoidance and Price Synchronization.

Note that all items on the label will be excluded from all Oversell Avoidance and Price Synchronization processing. 

• To add inventory items to the exclusion list, assign them to the label.  
• To start Oversell Avoidance and Price Synchronization processing for items that have been previously excluded, remove the label (either from the item or from the setting to enable all items) and they will start processing automatically for new updates.  

Note: It is not possible to exclude an item from Oversell Avoidance and still have Price Synchronization apply.

How to Withdraw or Revise?

You can select to have the Oversell Avoidance system withdraw open listings or revise them to reduce the quantity when only part of the quantity is needed to restore the inventory item to a non-negative situation.  By default, the withdraw option is selected because it is 100% safe to ensure that quantity will be accurately calculated.  Because of current limitations submitting quantity updates on open listings to eBay, it is possible that the revise process will not be able to accurately restock the proper quantity and an oversell condition can still occur.  While this is an extremely rare case, the potential does exist and must be weighed when selecting the option to use.  The pros and cons of each option:

When processing, the oversell avoidance logic will look at all of the open listings for the inventory item.  It will process through each of them one at a time until sufficient quantity has been recovered to prevent an oversell condition or no remaining quantity is available for sale.  As noted in the previous section, the listings with the longest remaining time will be processed first.  Quantity will be processed based on the Withdraw or Revise option for your items as shown in the example table below:

If there is an error from eBay regarding the revise process, the listing will be ended to ensure that oversells cannot happen and to have the quantity restocked to the inventory item.