real-time stock possible?

One of my competitors, gets the same products i sell from the same drop shipper... I noticed his website has Real-Time stock. With my drop shipper they offer a program that you can update daily and submit your order through this program. With the program you can view the warehouse stock, backorders, retail price, dealer price, my price. Also account information. it has a feature to download a file in notebook and it give the warehouse item number, upc, title of product, weight etc all the information..
--Some how my competitor is up to date with all stock = to the warehouse stock. I know his business is just two people in on it and he does very good. Just trying to figure out how he has real-time stock... Any ideas how he may be doing this?

For example, if your dropshipper offers some kind of info available about the stock(via xml feed for example), then it's easy to check stockevery once in a while and update (automatically), I have done this a few times.

If you provide some links we might be able to peek at the code

his website is here theres no way he updates the stock himself he has some kind of program doing it .. thanks kobra!

I see no evidence of interactive "Real Time" stock updating

You could validate this by checking his stock on an item that you are about to buy from the shipper and see how long it takes for his "instock value" to change

Could be a periodic cron update routine or?? but I suspect not "RealTime"

okay sounds good thanks !

Talked to my account manager today to ask here if there is a way of updating my products faster and inventory and she said: As for programming for updating inventory there are portals through FTP but you would need to design a program from your end. I would need to speak to one of our current dealer to see exactly what is involved... hurm