How to Manage BigCommerce Orders When You're Selling on Multiple Channels

You listed your products on Amazon last month. Orders started coming in almost immediately, which was great. What wasn't great was realizing that an Amazon sale didn't reduce your BigCommerce inventory, that you'd oversold a product by the end of the first week, and that you were now managing orders in two completely separate systems with no connection between them.

If that sounds familiar, welcome to the reality of multichannel selling. BigCommerce is a strong storefront with built-in Channel Manager tools for listing products on Amazon, eBay, Facebook, and other platforms. But listing products is not the same as managing orders across channels, and that distinction is where things start to break.

In this article, we'll explain what specifically goes wrong when you start selling on multiple channels from BigCommerce, and what your options are depending on how fast you're growing.

What Breaks When You Start Selling on BigCommerce and Other Channels

BigCommerce does a good job of pushing product listings to other marketplaces. The problem isn't getting your products onto Amazon or eBay. The problem is what happens after someone buys them.

Each channel operates as its own system. Amazon tracks Amazon orders. eBay tracks eBay orders. BigCommerce tracks BigCommerce orders. None of them automatically share inventory in real time, and none of them consolidate order data into a single view that your team can act on. The moment you're live on two or more channels, three things will start happening almost immediately:

Inventory drifts. A customer buys three units on Amazon, but BigCommerce still shows those three as available. Someone else orders them on your BigCommerce site an hour later. Now you've oversold, and someone is getting a cancellation email. The more channels you add, the faster this compounds. Our article on why BigCommerce inventory is always wrong digs deeper into the mechanics of this problem.

Order processing fragments. Your team is now logging into BigCommerce, Amazon Seller Central, and possibly eBay to check for new orders, process fulfillment, and update tracking. Each platform has its own interface, its own workflow, and its own rules. The manual overhead of checking multiple dashboards and re-entering data between systems grows linearly with every channel you add.

Financial data scatters. Amazon deposits on a different schedule than your BigCommerce payment processor. Each channel deducts different fees. Refunds process separately in each system. Getting a clear picture of your total revenue, margins, and profitability requires pulling data from every channel manually and reconciling it, usually in a spreadsheet. Our article on keeping your BigCommerce books accurate covers the accounting side of this problem in detail.

Your Options for Managing BigCommerce Orders Across Multiple Channels

The right approach depends on how many channels you're selling on, how many orders you're processing, and how quickly you're growing.

If You're on Two Channels With Modest Volume

BigCommerce's built-in Channel Manager can handle basic product listing and some order importing for marketplaces like Amazon and eBay. For a store doing a few dozen orders per day across two channels, this may be enough to keep things manageable, especially if you pair it with a disciplined process for manually reconciling inventory at the end of each day. This approach works best as a starting point, but it won't scale well past a few hundred orders per week.

If You're Growing and the Manual Work Is Becoming Unsustainable

A dedicated multichannel order management tool can centralize your orders from multiple channels into a single dashboard, sync inventory across platforms, and reduce the manual work of checking each system separately. These tools sit between your channels and your fulfillment process, automating the data flow that you're currently handling by hand. For a detailed comparison of the options available at this level, our article on the top multichannel order managers for growing businesses evaluates nine platforms across different tiers.

The tradeoff is that these tools solve the order and inventory problem but don't connect to your accounting, your warehouse operations, or your financial reporting. You'll still be reconciling sales data separately, and you'll have another subscription and another vendor to manage.

If You Need Everything Connected, Not Just Orders

At a certain point, the problem isn't just order management. It's that your storefront, your marketplace channels, your inventory, your accounting, and your warehouse all need to operate as one system. That's when a multichannel order management approach backed by an ERP platform becomes the more practical path. An ERP platform with native eCommerce connectors can pull orders from BigCommerce, Amazon, and other channels into a single system where inventory allocates in real time, financials record automatically, and your team works from one dashboard instead of five.

Keeping Your BigCommerce Multichannel Operations Under Control

If you're selling on BigCommerce and one or two other channels and already feeling the strain of managing orders across separate systems, you're not behind. That's exactly when this problem shows up for most growing eCommerce businesses. The tools that got you to this point were designed for single-channel selling, and the friction you're feeling is the natural result of outgrowing them.

The real cost isn't just the time your team spends toggling between dashboards. It's the oversold products that damage customer trust, the inventory discrepancies that compound daily, and the financial blind spots that make it harder to know which channels are actually profitable. Every channel you add multiplies these costs, and they don't slow down on their own.

If you're still in the early stages of multichannel selling, start by tightening your processes and evaluating whether a dedicated order management tool can close the gap. If you're further along and the problems are touching inventory, accounting, and warehouse operations simultaneously, our article on the signs you've outgrown BigCommerce's built-in tools can help you figure out whether it's time for a more connected system.

Not sure where you fall? Take our ERP Readiness Quiz to see whether your multichannel operations have outpaced your current tools.