Product availability information from online stores I
THE PROBLEM
It is challenging for businesses to ensure sufficient inventory to meet consumer demand for advertised products. This challenge to anticipate and match customer demand is exacerbated by the nature of e-commerce. For example, the number of customer orders is not limited in the same way as in brick-and-mortar retail sites. Items for which inventory has been depleted can be presented as available at the online store front. Customers may attempt to place an order for such items. Some systems do not even have mechanisms by which customers are notified that specific products are currently unavailable. This can be a frustrating customer experience. To be successful, online stores must provide up-to-date and accurate product availability information to customers.
THE SOLUTION
Our solution can provide up-to-date product availability information to customers in real time. To ensure accuracy, for a product advertised on the store front, our online store front not only keeps track of its quantity physically in inventory, our solutions also monitor a number of other factors, such as quantities ordered but not yet shipped, quantities shipped on the day of determining availability, and quantities scheduled to arrive from vendors. For certain products, their availability information also depends on a holiday date (e.g., for seasonal items), or an expiration date (e.g., for items with limited shelf life). For some products, their availability is assumed because either the product is always available, or the delivery date is far enough out that the product is determined to be reliably available by that time.
When a consumer selects a product for viewing at the store front, the product's availability information will be presented. For example, the availability information can be that the product is not currently available at the selected delivery date, the product will be available on a later date, or the product is available until a specific date if the product is only available for a limited period of time.
Our solution can also divide up a customer order into multiple orders with different delivery dates if the order includes items unavailable by the selected delivery date specified by the customer. For example, items determined unavailable on the selected date are placed in another order which is assigned a later date upon which such items will be available for delivery. Or, the customer is given a choice to consolidate all of his items in the order to be delivered at the later date.
There can be many customers ordering the same product from many different computers at the same time. There can be many servers responsible to the different customers (or many instances of the availability information on many computers). It is difficult to synchronize information in all of the servers all the time. Our solutions can provide a product quota in each server. When the quota in one server is exhausted, availability information of the products in all of the servers would be synchronized at that time.
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