Case Study: Multi-Channel E-commerce Sync (Shopify + Amazon + Etsy)

Birchwood Goods is an artisan home decor brand that started on Etsy in 2019, selling hand-poured candles, ceramic planters, and woven textiles. By 2024, they had expanded to Shopify for their direct-to-consumer store and Amazon for marketplace reach. Revenue crossed $1.8 million annually, and the three-person operations team was drowning in the operational complexity of managing three separate sales channels with no connection between them.

The founder described the situation with painful clarity: "We were spending more time managing spreadsheets than making products. Every morning started with an hour of checking orders across three platforms, updating inventory in three places, and praying we had not oversold something overnight. It was like running three separate businesses with one small team."

The Challenge

Birchwood's problems fell into three interconnected categories: inventory chaos, order fragmentation, and accounting nightmares.

Inventory was managed in three separate systems with no synchronization. When a candle sold on Amazon, the Etsy and Shopify listings still showed it as available. The team tried to manually update all three platforms after each sale, but during busy periods this was impossible to keep up with. They were averaging 15 to 20 oversells per month, each requiring a cancellation, refund, and apologetic customer communication. On Amazon, overselling triggered metric warnings that threatened their seller account health.

Orders from each channel were processed independently. Amazon orders were fulfilled through Seller Central. Shopify orders were printed and packed from the Shopify admin. Etsy orders were managed through the Etsy seller dashboard. The warehouse team worked from three different pick lists, three different packing slip formats, and three different shipping workflows. The inefficiency was staggering: items sitting on adjacent shelves were being picked in three separate trips because the orders came from different systems.

"Our bookkeeper spent 15 hours a month just reconciling sales across the three platforms. She had to manually match every transaction from Shopify, Amazon, and Etsy to the correct income accounts in QuickBooks, account for each platform's different fee structures, and make sure nothing was double-counted. It was incredibly tedious and error-prone."

The accounting reconciliation was the final pain point. Each platform reported revenue differently, withheld different fees, and deposited funds on different schedules. Getting an accurate picture of profitability by product, by channel, required hours of manual spreadsheet work every month.

The Solution

The solution created a centralized hub that connected all three sales channels bidirectionally, providing unified inventory management, consolidated order processing, and automated financial synchronization with QuickBooks.

The multi-channel hub connecting Shopify, Amazon, and Etsy through a centralized operations layer.

The inventory synchronization layer uses webhook-triggered automation built on Make.com. Every sale, return, or inventory adjustment on any channel triggers an immediate update to the central inventory database, which then pushes the updated count to all other channels within 30 seconds. Safety stock buffers are configured per channel based on sales velocity, ensuring that the last available units are never simultaneously offered on multiple platforms.

Order consolidation was the second major component. All orders from all three channels flow into a single queue, where they are normalized into a standard format regardless of source. The warehouse team now works from one unified pick list that batches orders by location in the warehouse rather than by sales channel. A single order from Shopify, two from Amazon, and one from Etsy that all include the same candle variant are picked together in one trip rather than four separate trips across the day. All orders route through ShipStation for rate-optimized shipping regardless of origin channel.

The financial automation component maps each channel's transactions to the correct QuickBooks accounts automatically. Shopify sales, Amazon sales (net of FBA fees), and Etsy sales (net of transaction and listing fees) are each recorded with the appropriate revenue allocation and fee deductions. The monthly reconciliation that previously took 15 hours now happens continuously and automatically.

The Results

After 90 days of operation, the results were transformative for a small team managing a multi-channel brand.

• Overselling eliminated completely. Zero oversells in 90 days, compared to 15 to 20 per month previously. Amazon account health metrics returned to excellent status.
• Warehouse efficiency improved by 40%. Unified pick lists and consolidated fulfillment reduced average pick-and-pack time per order from 8 minutes to under 5 minutes.
• Monthly bookkeeping reduced from 15 hours to 45 minutes. The bookkeeper now reviews auto-generated reports rather than manually reconciling thousands of transactions.
• Shipping costs reduced by 12%. Routing all orders through ShipStation's rate shopping engine, regardless of originating channel, unlocked better carrier rates and eliminated the inefficiency of using each platform's native shipping tools.
• Revenue increased by 23% in the first quarter. With accurate inventory data, Birchwood could confidently run promotions across all channels simultaneously, something they previously avoided for fear of overselling.
• Team capacity freed for growth. The operations team went from spending 60% of their time on channel management to 15%, redirecting the rest toward product development and marketing.

Key Takeaways

Multi-channel selling is a strategy; multi-channel operations should not be. Selling on Shopify, Amazon, and Etsy provides reach and revenue diversification. But operating three separate fulfillment workflows, three separate inventory systems, and three separate accounting processes is an operational tax that grows with every unit sold. Centralizing operations while keeping channels diverse is the winning formula.

Warehouse consolidation delivers surprising efficiency gains. Birchwood did not expect warehouse productivity to improve by 40%. The gain came from batching picks by warehouse location rather than by channel, eliminating redundant trips to the same shelves for orders that happened to come from different platforms.

Financial clarity enables better channel decisions. With automated channel-level profitability tracking, Birchwood discovered that their Etsy margin was significantly lower than they thought after accounting for all fees. This data-driven insight led them to adjust Etsy pricing and shift promotional spending to higher-margin channels.

Start with inventory sync, then expand. The most urgent problem was overselling, so inventory synchronization was implemented first. Order consolidation and financial automation were added in subsequent phases. This phased approach kept each implementation manageable and delivered visible value at every stage.

If your e-commerce brand is managing multiple channels independently, learn how e-commerce automation and Shopify-QuickBooks integration can unify your operations.