Inventory visibility allows ecommerce service providers to track and monitor inventory levels in real time throughout the supply chain. If your business has achieved this competence, you’re benefitting from clear and hyper-current information on the location, quantity and availability of products across distribution centers and warehouses, as well as items in transit or sitting on store shelves.
Although inventory visibility already plays a central role in meeting demand, maintaining service levels, and streamlining operations, it’s the combination of real-time inventory visibility and advanced search functionality that’s reshaping your customer experience by delivering on transparency, control, confidence and reliability.
More broadly, technology infusion is driving tighter integration when it comes to next-generation ecommerce, which means that discrete capabilities — such as search functionality and inventory visibility — will become increasingly interconnected. Experts believe this trend will lead to better overall performance resulting from higher profitability, stronger productivity and better customer experiences.
Integrating Search Functionality and Inventory Visibility
Survey data reveals that two-thirds of consumers say they will leave an ecommerce site and choose another retailer if the item they intended to purchase is out of stock. For retailers, this signals the importance of empowering shoppers to find the products they want with ease while simultaneously verifying they’re in stock — and you can achieve this level of service by linking search functionality and inventory visibility.
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Moreover, customers are paying attention to delivery details (particularly during the holiday season) and will abandon a transaction if fulfillment parameters are unacceptable. Therefore, knowing that a product is currently in stock and available for immediate delivery is an important factor, which means keeping your stock data updated and transparent will help you retain customers and complete sales transactions.
When your customers have confidence in inventory availability related to their searches, they’re more likely to complete the transaction — particularly for low-stock products — because the urgency becomes the impetus for faster purchasing decisions. Furthermore, the integration of inventory visibility and search reduces the likelihood of stockouts and overselling while enabling seamless cross-channel fulfillment.
Applying Use Cases
When search results are tied to real-time inventory data, your customers can refine their queries to find and purchase what they need faster and with better precision. For example, using dynamic filtering and sorting capabilities, customers can narrow search results to surface in-stock products, or items available for immediate shipping — they can also sort by available quantity and exclude pre-order or backordered items. These capabilities prevent the inconvenience of scrolling through irrelevant or unavailable listings.
Combining inventory data with geolocation, your customers can utilize search results prioritized by proximity to nearby stores that have the items they need in stock. Customers also can filter products by in-store pickup availability or take advantage of buy online/pick up in-store (BOPIS) fulfillment options.
If your customer searches for an item that’s out of stock, the technology can suggest substitutes that are both relevant and available. Because these recommendations are automated, customers receive them instantly; the immediacy is crucial, because delays can lead to distraction, lost interest and uncompleted transactions.
Some ecommerce companies combine inventory and search functionality to optimize promotions and upselling. Using this data, you can offer dynamic promotions based on stock levels; for example, you can run discounts on overstocked items or promote “last call” messages that spur customers to buy items they might otherwise overlook.
When it comes to demand forecasting, you can analyze search patterns in conjunction with inventory data to optimize inventory levels across locations, adjust based on emerging trends and predict future demand with better accuracy.
If you’re working with multiple suppliers and drop-shippers, you can apply these capabilities to present accurate availability data from various sources in search results, as well as route orders to the correct supplier based on inventory levels. This helps you provide transparency on shipping windows based on inventory supply.
By implementing these use cases and others, you can leverage the power of advanced search functionality that’s linked to real-time inventory visibility to drive sales, optimize operations and deliver better customer experiences. Ultimately, the integration enables a friction-free shopping experience while helping you manage your inventory more effectively.
Keeping Pace with Industry Innovation
Ecommerce service providers are contending with an increasingly customer-centric business environment in which they’re competing to offer the latest and greatest convenience. As expectations heighten with each customer experience innovation, keeping pace has become a pervasive challenge for many of your peers.
You might relate to common struggles in the omnichannel customer-driven landscape, particularly when it comes to profitable delivery of whatever-whenever-wherever shopping experiences. For example, your peers are likely experiencing difficulties with higher fulfillment costs, inventory limitations, unpredictable demand and systems constraints.
When it comes to customers, survey data shows that only one-third of shoppers are fully satisfied with their shopping experiences, citing price, transactional ease, assortment and delivery assurance as top drivers. Moreover, only 8% of supply chain executives say their organizations are properly structured to operate successfully in an omnichannel model.
While customer-driven insights into what’s important are straightforward, many businesses lack the knowledge and infrastructure needed to execute effectively on this information. Subsequently, some of your peers will take a patchwork approach, which will not be sustainable with the increasingly rapid rate of innovation.
The transformation to a successful omnichannel market offering starts with the understanding that supply chain leaders are departing from the linear logic of traditional supply chain doctrine. Because computing power has accelerated exponentially while costs for bandwidth and data storage have declined, you’re facing a digital revolution in which dynamically connected supply networks can be directed, tracked, expedited, modified, merged and taught throughout the entire lifecycle.
These consequential and sustained technological advancements will address ever-higher customer expectations — customers will direct the when, where, and how they choose to shop, and retailers will fulfill orders without sacrificing price or quality.
This promise requires a new supply chain model that’s built around a digital core that enables dynamic data capture and flow, offers real-time analytics and full network visibility and leverages AI and machine learning (ML) to automate rapid decision-making.
These next-generation always-on digital supply chain networks (DSNs) are fully interconnected. Because they’re dynamic and designed to leverage multiple data sources to make real-time decisions autonomously, you can apply rich data analytics to important nuances, such as the impact of temperature variations on fresh produce, or real-time transit delays that could impact delivery windows. Because DSNs bring interconnected end-to-end visibility, you can centralize data capture from network inputs and continuously flow this information to suppliers, partners, and customers.
Although urgent, it’s important to be mindful of process. Your transformation roadmap should be enterprise-wide and carefully considered. Because your sustainable success hinges on clearly defined and measurable goals, you should involve key stakeholders early to prevent roadblocks and align efforts.
Sachin Sharma serves as the Chief Product Officer and Head of Professional Services at Kibo Commerce. In this capacity, he oversees product strategy, management, user experience and documentation, while also leading the professional services team responsible for client implementations and partner enablement. Prior to joining Kibo in 2018, Sharma was part of Vista Equity Partners’ operating arm, collaborating with executive teams across the firm’s portfolio to enhance go-to-market effectiveness and operational efficiency. He holds an A.B. in economics and philosophy from the University of Chicago.