Many product retail franchisors have similar concerns when looking at Omni-Channel solutions. These issues include stock accuracy/integrity, multiple unlinked technology systems and outdated infrastructure.
These concerns are due to each franchisee having their own rules around stock accuracy. Some franchisees can choose their own Point of sale (POS) system and some long tenured franchisees may be running older outdated POS systems. These factors combined make it difficult for the franchisor to aggregate data and result in low confidence in the store stock integrity.
stockinstore™ was designed to address these concerns…
Multiple Stores
Most franchise stores run their own POS system, so each store network would provide a separate file. The good news it that stockinstore™ is setup and designed to work with multiple POS/ERP systems.
Incomplete Participation
Some chains may have stores that will not provide any stock data, whether by choice or they don’t have the capability. There are a couple of ways stockinstore™ is set up to solve this:
Option A: Stores can have a generic “Call store to confirm” or similar for all items. This ensures the store is represented in search results if customers are nearby.
Option B: These store can be left out of the search results altogether, however we don’t recommend this approach
As stockinstore™ promotes visits to the non-participating franchisee stores, they can be quickly added once they are able to provide their POS data.
Stock integrity & stock accuracy
After speaking to a range of retailers we realized that one of the key challenges they face when wanting to implement stockinstore™ is around their stock integrity and accuracy. We have therefore spent hundreds of hours solving this issue when we designed and developed stockinstore™.
Retailers that don’t know exactly how many of each item they have in stores can still use stockinstore™. One alternative is to apply thresholds as guidelines for stock availability rather than actual numbers to provide to customers. There thresholds can be set across the site and can be customized per store and then by item if required.
However, large, multi-department, mass market retailers carry too many items to manage this manually. We have therefore built a second solution which incorporates stock movements into an algorithm to manage it dynamically. This method is more effective, the more we updates we do per day so it is more accurate during busy promotional periods.
Coupled with thresholds this would resolve all stock integrity concerns.
Get in touch. We’d love to chat about how stockinstore™ is giving franchises the ability to show accurate stock availability across their store network.
