Amrod stock levels, and which number you can sell against
Amrod publishes stock at several levels at once. Use the wrong one and every size of a shirt shows the same figure.
If your website shows the same stock number against every size of a garment, this page explains why, and it is worth fixing. Quoting stock you do not have is the fastest way to lose a corporate customer.
Amrod publishes stock at four levels
Each row in the stock feed carries a type, and they mean different things.
| Type | What it counts | Safe to sell against? |
|---|---|---|
| 0 | Everything across the whole base product, all colours and all sizes added together | No |
| 1 | Everything in one colour, all sizes added together | No |
| 2 | One colour in one size. The actual sellable item | Yes |
| 3 | Present in the live feed and not described in the documentation | No |
Only the third row answers the question a customer is actually asking, which is whether you have 40 navy in medium.
What the totals do to a quote
Take a golf shirt in three colours and eight sizes, and say the whole product holds 1 200 units.
Read the base-product total and every one of those 24 combinations shows 1 200 available. Navy medium shows 1 200. Charcoal 5XL shows 1 200. The site looks confident and is wrong 24 times over.
Read the colour total and it improves without becoming correct. Navy shows its 400 against every navy size, so navy small and navy 5XL both claim 400.
Neither is a rounding error. They are the difference between a quote you can fulfil and one you cannot.
The other cause of identical numbers
There is a second way to arrive at the same symptom, and it is worth ruling out.
Amrod uses two kinds of code. A base product code identifies the parent, which holds the description, the images and the categories. A variant code identifies the sellable item, a specific colour in a specific size.
Stock and prices are published against the variant code. Match them on the base code instead and every variation inherits the same row, which produces exactly the same wrong figures as reading a total.
So if your sizes all show the same number, check both: which stock level is being read, and which code the join uses. The Amrod API in practice covers the join in detail.
Incoming stock is worth showing
The feed carries more than what is on hand. It also carries what Amrod has on order and when it is expected.
That turns a dead end into a decision. "Out of stock" ends the conversation. "None now, 5 000 expected 24 September" lets a customer planning a December campaign carry on talking to you.
It costs nothing to show, since the data is already in the response, and most sites throw it away.
How fresh the numbers need to be
Stock moves all day. A figure pulled last night is a figure from last night.
Amrod publishes both a full stock feed and a changes feed, which allows a sensible pattern: take a full snapshot a few times a day so nothing drifts, and apply the changes feed every fifteen minutes in between. The result is a site whose worst case is a quarter of an hour out of date rather than a day.
One thing to avoid on the way. Writing 25 000 stock values into your shop's product records every fifteen minutes generates an enormous amount of database work and will slow the site down. Keep stock in its own table and read it when the page renders. It is a single fast query and it costs nothing.
Checking your own site
Open a garment you know is short in one size. If every size shows the same number, or if a size you know is finished still shows availability, the site is reading the wrong level or joining on the wrong code.
Then open something in three colours. If all three colours report identical figures across identical sizes, that is the colour total being repeated, and it will keep being wrong in the customer's favour until it is fixed.
Questions people ask
Which Amrod stock number is the real one?
The per-variant figure, published as stockType 2. It is the only level that tells you what is available in a specific colour and size. The others are totals and are for display only.
Why does every size show the same stock on my website?
Almost always one of two mistakes: the site is reading a total for the base product or for the colour instead of the per-variant figure, or prices and stock have been joined on the base product code instead of the variant code.
How often does Amrod stock change?
Continuously through the trading day. Amrod publishes both a full stock feed and a changes feed, so a site can hold a full snapshot and top it up through the day.
What is incoming stock?
Quantity on order from Amrod with an expected date. Showing it turns an out-of-stock line into a date the customer can plan around instead of a dead end.
Written by CatalogueConnect.
We build Amrod resellers a website that carries the whole catalogue, prices it with your markup and takes the order on one grid. R18 999 to build, R399 a month for the first 6 months, then R499. See the pricing or tell us about your account.
CatalogueConnect is an independent web developer. It is not part of Amrod Corporate Solutions and does not act for Amrod. Details here are checked against Amrod's own published documentation and against live integrations, and Amrod can change them without telling us. Last checked 8 September 2026.