Skip to content
  • There are no suggestions because the search field is empty.

How to make inventory updates run faster?

There are a couple of things that first come to mind when you want to find why your inventory updates are running slow: 

1. The timing of these updates.

Spark Shipping is limited by your site's API rate limit. Each shopping cart has a limit of how many API calls can be made per second, and they usually increase this limit according to the subscription plan you're in. For more context, check out this Shopify API rate limits article. BigCommerce has some info on their FAQs page as well. 

2. The size of the file that's being run by Spark Shipping.

Spark Shipping parses the vendor's feed and pushes the updates to your store in parallel. Back to point #1, if the file Spark Shipping is running is large and it's limited by the API rate limit, it is expected for the file to take longer to finish updating compared to other smaller files.

 

Here are few tips that can help speed up the updates in Spark Shipping: 

  1. Set the inventory to run on a schedule that best fits your needs, your vendor's updates schedule and your site's API rate limit. Also, try not to schedule multiple inventory updates to run at the same time. In each inventory update, the Run Schedule can be every hour, every 2, 6 or 12 hours, once a day, every 2 days or once a week, and you can set a Run Time and tick Do not run on weekends.

2. Set up an inventory max threshold. Spark Shipping only sends a product to your store when the quantity it would send has changed, and every vendor quantity above the Stock Maximum is sent as the maximum, so a lower maximum means fewer updates.

  1. If an inventory update should only update stock in Spark Shipping and not in your store, set Update Inventory Quantity in Shopping Cart to Update local only.

For more detail, see Spark Optimized Sync and Shopify API rate limits.