Automatic product availability at supplier verification during order placement in an online store

IdoSell has been supporting cross-docking for a long time. We helped our customers to cyclically synchronize stock levels from any supplier (thanks to the open IOF format and the dedicated IAI Downloader application enabling integration with suppliers. ICDF is the next solution that enables automatic product availability at supplier verification during order placement in an online store.

Supplier stock levels can be verified before an order is placed in your store

Analysis of thousands of retail and wholesale online stores we support every day led us to an observation that even frequent product availability synchronization cannot completely eliminate situations where customers order products which are out of stock.

Consequences of such situations are quite obvious. Customers are dissatisfied and may not return to your store.

Aiming to prevent such situations from occurring, we prepared a solution where if a customer's basket contains products that need to be shipped by a supplier, their availability is verified with the supplier at the very moment of placing the order.

Presented solution is available for all retail and wholesale stores on the IdoSell platform. Retail and wholesale stores need simply to configure their administration panels and can use this solution right away.

Stock level verification during order placement by a customer – in practice

Have a look at the example portraying the idea of stock level verification:

• your shop offers a product of which 10 pieces are available (located in the external warehouse, M0) – such state was defined during the last supplier stock level synchronization
• a customer wants to order 3 pieces of this product
• while the customer is placing the order in your store, we check whether the supplier still offers the necessary product quantity
• if yes, the customer finalizes the order
• if the wholesale store offers less that 3 pieces, appropriate information will be displayed in the customer's basket, stating that product quantity should be smaller – product stock level in the external warehouse (M0) will be automatically corrected to the one currently offered by the supplier

Summing up, this solution does not allow for placing orders for products which are out of stock at your supplier'.

Sounds interesting? Learn how to configure automatic product availability verification during order placement.

Automatic supplier data retrieval

Both retail and wholesale online stores use IdoSell solutions. Very often wholesale stores cooperating with IdoSell retail stores, use our b2b solutions.

Thus, we thought about facilitating the process of filling in supplier data for stores making purchases in these wholesale stores. Instead of entering data manually, it can be filled in automatically. Now you just need to enter the address of an IdoSell wholesale store you make purchases in, and the following data will be filled in automatically:

supplier's company name
supplier's contact data (e.g. e-mail, phone, fax, address)
time the wholesale store needs to prepare orders for shipping
warehouse opening hours on specific days

For developers

If you support a wholesale store that uses a solution different than IdoSell and makes its offer available to IdoSell stores, thanks to IdoSell Open SaaS™ you can:

enable automatic product availability verification during order placement
enable automatic data retrieval for the wholesale store you support

Documentation of all necessary ICDF endpoints can be found here: Internet Cross-docking and Dropshipping Format. You may also want to have a look at: How to enable product availability verification during order placement.