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Pricing & Inventory Sync for B2B: Why It Breaks (and How to Fix It Without Replatforming)

Your B2B ecommerce pricing is wrong. Your inventory counts don't match. But you can't afford to rip everything out and start over. Here's how to diagnose and fix the most common sync failures.

February 6, 2026

You know the symptoms:

A customer calls because their negotiated pricing didn’t apply. They were charged list price—$3,000 more than expected.

Or: a customer places an order for 50 units, but the warehouse only has 12. The website showed 50. The ERP showed 12. Now you’re scrambling.

Or: prices updated in the ERP three days ago. The website still shows the old prices. Someone is “looking into it.”

These aren’t edge cases. They’re Tuesday.

And the typical advice—“replatform” or “rebuild the integration”—isn’t helpful when you’re running a business that needs to take orders today.

This guide is for B2B ecommerce operators who need to fix pricing and inventory sync without shutting down for six months. We’ll cover the most common failure patterns, their root causes, and specific fixes you can implement now.

Why Pricing and Inventory Sync Is Especially Hard in B2B

B2C ecommerce has (relatively) simple pricing: one price per product, maybe with promotions. Inventory is usually single-warehouse or outsourced to a 3PL.

B2B is different:

Pricing complexity:

  • Customer-specific negotiated prices
  • Contract pricing with expiration dates
  • Volume-based pricing tiers
  • Pricing by customer group
  • Regional pricing variations
  • Matrix pricing (price varies by size/color/material)
  • Cost-plus pricing that recalculates when costs change

Inventory complexity:

  • Multi-warehouse inventory (which warehouse does this customer see?)
  • Allocated inventory (committed to backorders, not available)
  • Drop-ship inventory (vendor stock, not your warehouse)
  • Consignment inventory
  • Minimum order quantities
  • Lead time variations by warehouse

Each complexity is another opportunity for sync to fail.

The 7 Most Common Sync Failures (and Their Fixes)

Failure 1: Customer Sees List Price Instead of Negotiated Price

Symptom: Customer logs in and sees list prices. Their negotiated pricing isn’t applied.

Root causes:

  • Customer account isn’t linked between ecommerce and ERP
  • Pricing sync failed (but the ecommerce platform fell back to list price silently)
  • Pricing data exists in ERP but was never pulled into ecommerce
  • Customer group assignment is wrong

Diagnosis:

  1. Check if the customer exists in both systems with matching identifiers
  2. Check if customer-specific pricing exists in ERP
  3. Check if pricing was ever transmitted to ecommerce (check sync logs)
  4. Check if pricing was received but not applied (check ecommerce pricing tables)

Fixes:

  • Immediate: Manually update pricing in ecommerce for affected customers
  • Systematic: Add validation that logs/alerts when a logged-in customer has no customer-specific pricing loaded
  • Preventive: Build a reconciliation check that compares customers-with-pricing in ERP vs. ecommerce

Failure 2: Stale Pricing (Updates Didn’t Sync)

Symptom: ERP pricing updated, but website still shows old prices.

Root causes:

  • Scheduled sync job failed or is stopped
  • Sync job ran but hit API rate limits
  • Pricing data format changed and sync is now erroring
  • Caching layer is serving old prices

Diagnosis:

  1. Check sync job status and logs
  2. Compare timestamps: when was ERP pricing updated? When did sync last run successfully?
  3. Check for errors in sync logs
  4. Check caching (CDN, full-page cache, Redis, etc.)

Fixes:

  • Immediate: Manually trigger sync; clear caches
  • Systematic: Add monitoring for sync job success; alert on failure
  • Preventive: Implement cache invalidation on pricing updates (don’t rely on TTL alone)

Failure 3: Inventory Shows Available When It’s Not

Symptom: Website shows units in stock. Warehouse doesn’t have them.

Root causes:

  • Inventory sync lag (website shows stale data)
  • Different inventory numbers: on-hand vs. available-to-promise
  • Allocated inventory not subtracted (committed to backorders)
  • Wrong warehouse displayed (customer location not matched)

Diagnosis:

  1. Compare inventory at each layer: ERP on-hand, ATP calculation, what ecommerce received
  2. Check sync timing: when did inventory last update?
  3. Check if allocations/reservations are being subtracted
  4. Check warehouse assignment logic

Fixes:

  • Immediate: Sync inventory manually; correct the mismatch
  • Systematic: Ensure you’re syncing ATP (available-to-promise), not raw on-hand
  • Preventive: Add “inventory sanity check” at checkout that re-validates before accepting order

Failure 4: Inventory Shows 0 When It’s In Stock

Symptom: Products show out of stock on website, but ERP shows plenty.

Root causes:

  • Sync direction wrong (ecommerce is overwriting ERP data)
  • Inventory sync filtering out valid data (wrong warehouse filter, wrong product filter)
  • Data type mismatch (ERP sends “1000”, ecommerce expects integer, parses as 0)
  • Safety stock subtraction too aggressive

Diagnosis:

  1. Check sync direction: is data flowing ERP → ecommerce or the reverse?
  2. Review sync filters: are products being excluded?
  3. Check data types and transformation logic
  4. Review safety stock and ATP calculation

Fixes:

  • Immediate: Manually update inventory in ecommerce
  • Systematic: Ensure sync is one-way for inventory (ERP → ecommerce); add logging to show what data is received
  • Preventive: Build reconciliation that flags products with 0 on ecommerce but >0 in ERP

Failure 5: Prices Render Wrong on Product Pages But Checkout Is Correct

Symptom: Customer sees wrong price while browsing; correct price appears at checkout.

Root causes:

  • Different price sources for display vs. cart calculation
  • Caching showing old prices; cart bypasses cache
  • Full-page cache not varying by customer group

Diagnosis:

  1. Identify where display price is sourced vs. cart price
  2. Check caching configuration: is price personalized correctly?
  3. Test with caching disabled

Fixes:

  • Immediate: Clear caches; warm cache with correct prices
  • Systematic: Use the same price source for display and cart; avoid dual-path pricing
  • Preventive: Implement edge-side personalization (cache varies by customer group) or punch-out pricing from cache

Failure 6: Partial Sync (Some Products/Customers Don’t Update)

Symptom: Most pricing/inventory is correct, but some products or customers are always stale.

Root causes:

  • Sync batch timeout before completion
  • Certain records fail validation and are silently skipped
  • Pagination bug (last page never processes)
  • Rate limit hit; no retry logic

Diagnosis:

  1. Compare record counts: how many records in ERP vs. ecommerce?
  2. Check sync logs for errors or warnings
  3. Review timeout and batch size settings
  4. Identify pattern in missing records (specific categories? customers? created after certain date?)

Fixes:

  • Immediate: Identify missing records; sync manually
  • Systematic: Add validation reporting (log all skipped records with reason); fix validation issues
  • Preventive: Add reconciliation check comparing record counts across systems; alert on mismatch

Failure 7: Race Conditions on High-Volume Updates

Symptom: During bulk price updates (annual price increase), some products show new price, some show old, intermittently.

Root causes:

  • Cache invalidation races: some servers updated, some not
  • Replication lag in distributed systems
  • Multiple sync processes stepping on each other
  • Customers mid-session with old data in cart

Diagnosis:

  1. Test from multiple browsers/locations simultaneously
  2. Check cache layer consistency
  3. Review sync process for concurrency issues

Fixes:

  • Immediate: Clear all caches; restart sync from known-good state
  • Systematic: Coordinate bulk updates with cache purge; consider maintenance window for large changes
  • Preventive: Implement price “effective date” so new prices activate everywhere simultaneously after sync completes

Quick Wins: Fixes You Can Implement This Week

These don’t require a major project. You can do them now.

1. Add Sync Health Monitoring

Create a dashboard that shows:

  • Last successful sync time for pricing and inventory
  • Error count in last 24 hours
  • Record count comparison between systems

Alert if sync hasn’t run in [N] hours.

2. Implement Checkout Validation

Before accepting an order, re-check:

  • Is the product still in stock? (Real-time inventory check)
  • Is the price still valid? (Re-fetch or validate against source)

This catches sync lag before it becomes a customer problem.

3. Build a Daily Reconciliation Report

Compare:

  • Products with price differences > $X between ERP and ecommerce
  • Products with inventory differences > Y units
  • Customers with pricing in ERP but not in ecommerce

Review daily. Fix discrepancies. Track trends.

4. Add Logging to Sync Processes

Every sync should log:

  • Start time, end time, duration
  • Records processed
  • Records skipped (with reason)
  • Errors encountered

You can’t fix what you can’t see.

5. Test Your Cache Invalidation

Manually update a price in ERP. Time how long until it’s visible on the website to a logged-in customer. Is it within your SLA? If not, fix the cache chain.

When to Replatform vs. Fix

Sometimes the integration is beyond repair. Signs you need to start over:

  • The integration technology is deprecated/unsupported
  • No one understands how it works (original developers gone, no documentation)
  • Fixes keep breaking other things
  • You’re spending more on maintenance than a rebuild would cost

But in most cases, systematic diagnosis and targeted fixes are more cost-effective than replatforming. Especially if the core architecture is sound and the problems are implementation bugs, not design flaws.

The Bottom Line

Pricing and inventory sync failures are fixable. They usually aren’t architectural problems—they’re bugs, configuration issues, or missing observability.

Start with diagnosis. Understand where data flows, where it fails, and why. Then apply targeted fixes. Add monitoring so you catch the next problem faster.

You don’t need to rip everything out. You need to find the leaks and patch them.

Need help diagnosing your sync failures? We do pricing and inventory sync audits for B2B ecommerce operations. We’ll trace your data flows, identify failure modes, and give you a prioritized fix list. Request an assessment.

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