Inventory Best Practices

Training and Documentation

The developer must provide the marketing and merchandising teams with a clear understanding of how stock level tracking has been implemented within their storefront.

Testing Inventory

• Inventory record updates are tested in staging before going into production.
• Inventory record updates are monitored when they go live into production.

Implement and Document Stock Level Tracking

Develop a workflow for the inventory management application:

• Identify clear roles and responsibilities related to inventory management within your organization
• When are product inventory records transmitted to Salesforce B2C Commerce?
• What information do the product inventory records contain?
• Do batch transmissions replace all product inventory records or only merge changed records?
• Who is managing inventory once the products go live?
• What signatures are required, at which steps?
• What are the specific timelines and deadlines?

Daily Operations

• Retrieve inventory data in the XML format defined by inventory.xsd, then import the product inventory records using a scheduled job in Business Manager: Administration > Operations > Job Schedules.
• If possible, retrieve changed product inventory records instead of all product inventory records.
• Import inventory into both the Production and Staging instances.
• Assign the inventory list. You assign each inventory list to one or more sites. Navigate to site > Merchant Tools > Products and Catalogs > Inventory Lists > inventory list > Site Assignments tab. The assignment is a manual process.

Clean up Inventory Transactions

You can speed record access (and cart checkout) time. Delete zero amount inventory transactions and inventory transactions with zero sum that correspond to the same order as frequently as possible. See Inventory Transactions Cleanup.