Multi-channel
One sheet, many marketplaces: a layout that survives growth
The instinct when you add a second marketplace is to add a second tab. It is tidy, it is obvious, and it is the thing you will undo in six months.
Why tabs per channel fail
Because the questions you need answered are cross-channel. What do I need to buy today? Which parcels have not scanned? What did I actually earn this month? Every one of those requires looking in several places and combining by hand.
Worse, the tabs drift. A column you add to one does not get added to the others, and after a while they are not the same shape any more, which makes combining them genuinely hard rather than merely tedious.
One table, a channel column
Put every order in one table with a channel column. Filter for one marketplace when you want one; do not filter when you want all. The tidiness you lose is cosmetic. The capability you gain is everything.
The columns that must be shared
For this to work, certain fields have to mean the same thing regardless of where the order came from.
- Channel - which marketplace
- Order id - as text, always
- Dispatch deadline - normalised to one timezone
- Status - your five buckets, not the platform is vocabulary
- Supplier cost - what you paid, recorded at purchase
- Tracking and carrier
- First scan date
Anything channel-specific goes to the right of those, and stays empty for rows where it does not apply. Empty cells are fine. Inconsistent meanings are not.
Normalise the deadline
Each marketplace expresses its dispatch deadline differently and in its own timezone. If you store them as they arrive, sorting by deadline across channels produces nonsense.
Convert to a single timezone on the way in. It is a small piece of work that makes the single most useful view - everything due today, regardless of channel - actually correct.
Status must be yours, not theirs
The platforms have dozens of statuses between them and they do not map cleanly. Translate each into your own small set at the point of import, and keep the original in a column further right for when you need to investigate.
What this enables
Once it is one table, the things that were hard become sorts and filters: today is work across all channels, every parcel with no scan, margin by product regardless of where it sold, which channel is actually worth the effort.
That last one is the question most multi-channel sellers cannot answer, and it is the one that should drive where they spend their time.