Managing Inventory Levels Best Practices

Inventory consists of the products you have available to sell. You can manage inventory and communicate information about it to customers in different ways. Order Management and B2C Commerce standard inventory set up provides accurate inventory levels. However, certain scenarios can require additional setup and basket logic to ensure accurate inventory levels at all times. These inventory considerations can help you use or extend the Order Management and B2C Commerce inventory synchronization process.

• The standard inventory synchronization process used in most common scenarios, synchronizes and manages inventory levels between B2C Commerce and Order Management using an automated task that sends full inventory data to B2C Commerce on a regular schedule. Optionally, a second automated task can send updates containing only changed inventory information on a more frequent basis. With the standard inventory process, no special coding is required and you can:
  • Enable feeds in Order Management.
  • Account for standard inventory levels between Order Management and the B2C storefront during periods of normal selling activity.
  • Depend on orders progressing from B2C Commerce to Order Management quickly and uniformly.
  • Reduce inventory from the site when items are sold in the storefront. This reserved inventory is cleared when new inventory files containing those products are sent from Order Management.
  • Use safety stock to manage some potential for oversell or special occasions when the product is tolerant of oversell.
• The extended inventory synchronization process used in specific scenarios can require adding logic code in the basket workflow in the B2C Commerce storefront. Scenarios can include: unaccounted for inventory, inventory accounted for more than once, prolonged delays between submitting an order and sending it to Order Management (because of fraud checks), or when high-volume orders are placed against items with limited inventory. With the extended inventory synchronization process, you can:
  • Check for available inventory before allocating inventory to a basket.
  • Use the checkForProductsWithNoInventory function to ensure that every product line item is retrieved and passed to a function that checks for zero inventory levels and returns whether all items have inventory.
  • Apply a hold in Order Management to reserve inventory quantity before handling payment authorization transactions.
  • Apply the GUIDs that the hold calls returned to all associated product line items. This action ensures that the inventory remains held until the order successfully imports into Order Management. In Order Management, the hold is then removed and the inventory is updated.
  • Remove holds from Order Management if an error occurs during basket submittal.