Inventory Scenarios
When dealing with inventory, there are many ways you can manage inventory and communicate information about it to customers.
Inventory consists of the products you have available to sell. Review these scenarios, which illustrate how to use or extend the SiteGenesis application to track product stock levels, when considering your Salesforce B2C Commerce inventory implementation:
Note: These models generally assume that you aren’t using Salesforce Omnichannel Inventory.
Many of their details don’t apply to implementations that use Omnichannel Inventory.
| Model Name | Description |
|---|---|
| Model 1 | Consider all products permanently in stock. |
| Model 2 | Some products have inventory records that control their availability. Other products without inventory records are considered to be permanently in stock. |
| Model 3 | All products are assumed to have inventory records. A front-end system frequently updates stock levels. There is no attempt to track inventory availability in B2C Commerce. |
| Model 4 | All products are assumed to have inventory records. B2C Commerce maintains stock levels for product display, cart display, and checkout. |
| Model 5 | B2C Commerce maintains stock levels for product display and checkout. B2C Commerce calls the external inventory system at add-to-cart for a real-time stock level check. |
| Model 6 | B2C Commerce maintains stock levels for product display and cart display. B2C Commerce calls the external inventory system at checkout for a real-time stock level check. |
After reviewing these scenarios, answer the following questions and plan your inventory strategy.
- Do you maintain inventory levels?
If no:
- Do you want to treat all products as always available? Refer to Model 1 - No Product Records
- Do you want to treat individual products as always available? Refer to Model 2 - Inventory Information for Some Products
If yes:
- What information can your Inventory Management System transmit to B2C Commerce?
- Consider models 2 through 5.
- Do you support backorder or pre-order?
If no:
- How to you want to handle these orders? Refer to Model 3 - B2C Commerce Doesn't Calculate ATS Values and Model 4 - B2C Commerce Calculates ATS Values
- What information does your Order Management System require?
If yes, consider models 2 through 5.
- Do you support an in stock date?
If no:
- Do you want to treat all products as always available? Refer to Model 1 - No Product Records
- Do you want to treat individual products as always available? Refer to Model 2 - Inventory Information for Some Products
If yes, consider models 2 through 5.
- Can you support real-time stock level
checks?
If yes:
- To check at Add-to-Cart, refer to Model 5 - Real-Time Inventory Availability At Add-to-Cart
- To check at Checkout, refer to Model 6 - Real-Time Inventory Availability At Checkout
- Do you want to take a product off-line when
out of stock?
- If yes, refer to Common Implementations and Customizations
- If no, no changes are required.
- How do you treat secondary products in a
bundle? Refer to Updating Stock
Levels
- When the primary product becomes unavailable?
- When the stock level of the primary product is incremented or decremented?
- How do you want to show unavailable products on category pages?
- Can you support partial inventory updates? If yes, how often do you want to run them?
- How often do you want to run full inventory updates?
- Do you support bundled products? If yes, how do you structure order information that you transmit back to the order management system?