This week marks the release of the Xbox Slim and no doubt demand will be high and many stores will run out of stock very quickly. As we’ve seen in recent months with the new iPhone and iPad, huge surges in demand can play havoc with many retailers stock levels and can leave many shoppers disappointed and in the current climate, no retailer wants to have to deal with any more disgruntled customers then they have to!
Such surges in demand and the risk of products running quickly out of stock on the high street has driven more and more customers to the web where they are well versed with the plethora of product listing sites now accessible over the internet. Many retailers are getting wiser to the importance of having visibility on these, yet I am still surprised at the numbers who aren’t keeping their stock availability up to date online.
If products are on many sites, then understandably it can seem an arduous tasks to ensure the stock numbers online are kept accurate, but both customers and sites such as Amazon are demanding this real time information as the online customer experience becomes more and more important. Nothing is worse for Amazon than an item ‘appearing’ to be in stock online only for the customer to find after purchasing it that it has in fact sold out, which can cause huge problems for the retailer in its relationship with Amazon.
We developed Feed Manager as a solution to this problem as we found that many retailers had the information available to update their product feeds, but simply didn’t have the ‘thing’ that could feed this information out to the web and where it needed to go. There are many strategies for retailers to achieve maximum results and Feed Manager is the most advanced solution on the market for adapting the data it receives in from the retailer and using it for whatever purpose the retailer needs.
With Christmas just around the corner, stock availability will be an critical issue for many retailers and so it is highly advisable to get their listing processes in order so that their online product display matches the real picture in the warehouse.