Availability and Warehouse Assignment
Check out the Emporix use case of product availability check and warehouse reassignment process.
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Check out the Emporix use case of product availability check and warehouse reassignment process.
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To ensure smooth shopping experience for your customers, your online store has to have some backend mechanism to check availability of the products in your storefront site.
In B2B world, typically customers get assigned to a specific warehouse based on their address. The warehouse is determined when a customer logs in to the online store. Basing on the assigned warehouse, the customer can see the relevant availability of products in the store. Frequently, the availability data comes from external systems such as ERP or OMS. When the customer adds a product to cart, the background process has to retrieve its availability information from an external system and return it to the storefront to allow or disallow the customer complete the checkout.
In this use case, we demonstrate how you can use CE together with OE to automate the process of assigning a customer to a warehouse and triggering availability check from an external system for a product added to a cart. Additionally, when a product is not available, the automated process notifies a merchant and asks for their approval to transfer the goods delivery to another warehouse where the product is available. The product availability is reflected in the storefront making it possible to complete the checkout. The customer in turn gets a coupon code for free shipping as a form of making up for the delayed delivery. The digital process enhances customer satisfaction and increases retention rate.
Sounds like a valid use case for your business? Let's take a look at how such a digital process can be configured.
In this digital process, we cover the following flow:
We are going to create two digital processes that can run separately: one digital process responsible for getting the right warehouse data, and another digital process taking care of checking products availability and taking appropriate actions when products are out of stock.
When a customer logs in to the online store, the digital process for assigning a corresponding warehouse starts. OE listens to the webhook event when a customer logs in and based on the customer's address information it writes down the warehouse information in the session context.
This way, the availability of products in the storefront reflects the stock levels in the particular warehouse that the customer got assigned to. The session context holds the information about the warehouse that is later retrieved when a customer adds a product to cart.
The digital process ends here, but if the customer decides to make some purchases on the storefront, their action triggers another digital process.
This digital process starts when a customer adds an item to cart. Orchestration Engine is subscribed to the webhook event of logging in that triggers the workflow.
The product availability is checked against the warehouse stock levels and is updated in the cart.
If the product is available, the flow ends. The customer can proceed with the checkout and complete the purchase.
If the product is out of stock, we add conditional logic for additional steps.
OE sends a form to a merchant with a request for transferring the missing product from another warehouse. The merchant gets a magic link to a form where they can directly act on the request.
When the merchant approves the change and the goods are transferred, it serves as a trigger to check availability and update it in the customer's cart to notify them that the items are ready to be purchased again.
If the merchant doesn't approve the transfer, the flow ends without any further changes.
As the customer is not able to get the selected product immediately, we add a step for automatic coupon creation as a means of making the customer happy again. When the item delivery is delayed because of the necessity to change the warehouse, OE triggers CE to create a coupon code for free delivery and sends it to the customer so that they can use it to complete the transferred product purchase.
Bear in mind this use case serves only as an example of what you can achieve with CE and OE. The digital processes we presented here can be adjusted to your actual needs. For further information, contact .
