Have you ever sold the same product twice? #Overselling

One of the biggest challenges with store fulfillment of online orders is that it increases the risk of selling the same item twice from shared online and offline inventory.

Here’s 4 ways that retailers can prevent “selling twice”:

1. Enable REAL-TIME inventory updates to ensure inventory accuracy across all channels — and I mean truly real-time. Stock updates at regular time intervals don’t work when both online and offline customers buy from the same stock.
2. Separate stock for online and offline customers. However, this requires additional storage capacity and can lead to increased stock thresholds.
3. Segment by SLAs. Store staff can divide the stock between same-day or next-day pickup orders and ship the next day’s orders to the store from the warehouse to reduce the use of store stock for online orders.
4. Allocate only a fixed amount of store inventory for online orders. This prevents depleting the store inventory for walk-in customers, especially during promotions and flash sales.

An omnichannel OMS is a critical tool and source of truth for all of these strategies. With an OMS, store staff can access real-time inventory visibility and update inventory levels across all channels. The system can also help segment orders by priority and reroute only same-day orders to stores.

OmnichannelRetail #OrderManagement #FutureOfRetail