Global software company Fluent Commerce has announced general availability of its data tool, ‘Fluent Big Inventory’.
As confirmed by the recent study by Incisiv, retailers still named getting accurate inventory visibility as the biggest challenge to managing their commerce operations. Overselling, in particular, remains one of the biggest resulting problems. This key requirement for most retailers and brands remains unresolved, while the negative impact of not having accurate inventory in real-time has significantly increased.
Existing systems prevent many from getting accurate real-time inventory across all channels. ERPs were not built to be inventory hubs. Out-of-date, unreliable data is the result. The alternative of building a custom application is expensive, time-consuming and requires ongoing maintenance and enhancement as new uses of inventory data emerge. Modern omnichannel retail requirements severely challenge this approach.
Providing inaccurate stock information to staff and customers results in overselling and cancelling orders, or underselling and losing revenue. Both of these experiences leave unsatisfied customers, and 64% of customers say they’ll jump ship to a competitor after a poor experience.
Fluent Big Inventory solves these problems. Using machine learning technology to intelligently process multi-source inventory data at unparalleled scale creates the ability to act as an inventory hub, providing real-time inventory feeds to enhance other operational systems (e.g. order management, commerce, search/merchandising, personalisation, recommendations, display ads, demand forecasting). Results from early adopting Fluent Commerce customers show an over 50% reduction in oversell whilst reducing operational costs.
CEO Graham Jackson says “Fluent Big Inventory makes all dependent systems more efficient by providing access to accurate, real-time inventory data showing what’s available to sell across all inventory locations at a speed and scale never seen before. Where retailers used to be able to make tens of millions of inventory updates a day, they can now make hundreds of millions - hitting the oversell/undersell problem squarely on the nose.”
“In the world of inventory, overnight batch jobs don’t work. The issue is that not all systems were designed to share data at the speed required by modern commerce,“ says Agnes Schliebitz-Ponthus, Senior Vice President, Product, Fluent Commerce.
“Unlike traditional data transformation tools that merely convert data from one structure to another, Fluent Big Inventory was designed to ingest disparate inventory data at scale, from file-based through to live event streaming, and to continually learn how to optimise the processing and distribution of the resulting data sets.
Fluent Commerce’s Order Management System, ‘Fluent Order Management’ is used by leading global retailers around the world including JD Sports, L’Oréal, Aldo Group, Prada, LVMH and Dulux.
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