SKU IQ communicates directly with your Point of Sale and eCommerce to facilitate inventory changes!
We have built our software to speak directly to Point of Sale and eCommerce APIs to facilitate inventory quantity changes in real time!
What's an API?
An API - or Application Program Interface - is the code that your eCommerce or Point of Sale use send information back and forth with us or with other apps that you can add! For example, the weather app on your phone talks to the API for the weather bureau's software system that contains all of the daily weather data and then shows you what the weather is for your location!
SKU IQ does the same thing, talking to your eCommerce and Point of Sale to notify the other platform of any changes in inventory or product data. So if you make a sale on your website, you'll notice the quantity has been deducted within a few seconds from your Point of Sale - and vice versa. Syncing orders takes a little while longer as there's a lot more data that needs to be synced over from your eCommerce to your Point of Sale. For some integrations, order syncing can take several hours.
You may be wondering about TikTok Shop as well. As our newest integration (as of January 2023), TikTok Shop and Shopify talk in the same way as our other platforms, but with a twist. We send order information get from TikTok Shop sales to Shopify so that you can continue to fulfill your eCommerce orders the way you always have. TikTok Shop and Shopify is different from our usual integrations in that there is no brick and mortar store involved (not yet at least, we're working on that!).
TikTok Shop and Shopify allow you to expand your market onto TikTok while still letting you have the convenience of shipping the way you always have.
Check out this flow chart:
You can totally use TikTok Shop and Shopify to do drop shipping too! There are tons of apps available on the Shopify App Marketplace to help you become a successful drop shipper. If you do intend to use drop shipping apps, please contact Support prior to connecting to SKU IQ so that we can properly configure your SKU IQ account!