The battle for the buyer starts long before checkout. And every step in the journey counts. You can’t wait until the end. Customers want to know what’s in stock and when they can get it—during every step of the process. This means everywhere. Including:
- Google shopping search results
- Product Listing Pages (PLP), whether a category page, or showing search results
- Product Details Page (PDP). And of course, at checkout
What’s more, they expect those promises to be accurate. So what prevents more commerce sites from showing real-time inventory availability across the customer journey? Two things.
Live inventory data has two enemies
The first reason is latency. To show, near real-time availability, based on live API calls (rather than stale cached data), requires highly scalable back end systems. An ERP simply won’t cut it. ERPs weren’t designed to respond to hundreds or thousands of inventory availability checks per second. Which means live calls would be slow. So commerce sites have to rely on stale cached data instead. Which means the delivery and pickup options shown online don’t factor in real-time sourcing constraints like fulfillment capacity at a particular location. And the second reason?
Batch files from back end systems. A lot of ERPs can only send a full refresh of inventory positions, rather than just the ones that have changed. This results in long processing times. Which means inventory availability shown online is often many hours, if not a full day, old. This may not have mattered so much when ecommerce volumes were small. But as the percentage of business that is transacted online has increased, so has the need for more accurate inventory data. So how can you solve these problems?
A modern Enterprise Inventory Hub
Gone are the days when you could rely on your ERP to serve as an effective inventory hub for digital commerce. It’s simply not designed for it. You need a solution that lets you manage inventory availability. Control what you make available to each channel, market, or region. And segment inventory virtually without the need for physical inventory silos. What else?
Machine Learning optimized inventory data flows
A modern Enterprise Inventory Hub should also use Machine Learning (ML) to process inventory availability updates intelligently. Take those pesky batch files, and optimize them. Only update what’s necessary, and update the most important inventory positions first. That way your inventory availability data is always fresh. What else should it do?
Multiple real-time promises based on live sourcing decisions
This allows you to make multiple pickup and delivery promises to a customer at the same time. Based on real-time sourcing decisions— before the customer places an order. A promise that goes beyond whether something is simply in-stock or not. But it should includes other factors like:
- Location capacity – the number of in-flight orders already being processed at the closest location for shipping or preferred pickup location
- Product attributes – like whether an item is bulky or fragile, and requires special handling
- Carrier pickup times – which can vary by carrier and location
Just to name a few. So what’s the solution?
Fluent Order Management’s enterprise inventory availability hub
Fluent Order Management is the distributed order management system that includes the most advanced enterprise inventory hub on the market today. What makes it different?
- Intelligent Inventory Processing – Fluent Order Management uses ML to intelligently process inventory updates, so your fastest moving items are always updated first. In fact, customers have seen a 60-90% optimization of their inventory availability data flows. Which means what they show to customers is always fresh. The real-world result? A huge reduction in canceled orders, and related contact center costs.
- Live availability for multiple items – One customer shows their buyers 24 promises in under 500ms on their PLP. Based on live sourcing decisions for both pickup and delivery. Which not only builds customer trust, but also increases conversion rates.
- Optimized inventory data feeds for any digital channel or trading partner – In addition, Fluent Order Management makes it easy to push inventory availability updates to any other system or trading partner. But lets you control what you make available to each. For example, think about a marketplace channel. Maybe you only want a subset of your products available for sale. Or maybe you only want to ship marketplaces orders from a few locations (or fulfillment nodes), not all. And you might want to have different safety stock buffers applied to your marketplace channel so you can protect more stock for customers on your own online store. With optimized feeds, you can do all this and more. You can also use feeds to share inventory data with other systems.
In short, Fluent Order Management is designed to support digital commerce at scale.
How can accurate inventory availability help your business?
If your organization’s strategic digital commerce goals include any of the following:
- Increasing conversions and sales
- Increasing inventory turns
- Reducing canceled orders
- Increasing On Time In Full (OTIF) rate
Then making sure you get your inventory availability data right is key. With a modern enterprise inventory hub, like Fluent Order Management, you’ll be able to significantly reduce the time it takes to process inventory updates. And show customers accurate availability at every stage in the buying journey, wherever they choose to shop. In less time than you think. How much time?
Many customers have gone live in as little as 8-22 weeks. How? By starting with their biggest pain point first. Then rolling out new features over time. Best of all, Fluent Order Management offers connectors for many of the top commerce platforms, and has been successfully integrated with most of the enterprise ERP solutions. So it’s a proven solution you can trust to get results. Fast. To learn more about Fluent Order Management’s enterprise availability hub and how it can help your business, contact us today.