Weekday online store: why the product is not available?

Surely, everyone who makes purchases online has come across a situation when the product is on the site, but in fact it turns out that the online store does not have it. It is especially insulting when the website of the online store near the goods is written in large letters. In stock . And it is even more offensive when the store manager, having received a request through the basket for a product that is not available, did not even bother to call back.

In general, the problem should be solved ideally - quite obvious: the supplier should generate a fresh price every 5-10 minutes, the online store should download it once every 5 minutes and update the information in its database. After that, update your own retail price, and price aggregators should, in turn, monitor every 5 minutes whether something has changed in the price list of the online store and update the information.

In this article I will describe why it does not work and how to deal with it.
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Initial data. Online electronics store, Ukraine, suppliers - all large (ERC, MTI, DataLux, Kvazar,) + a number of small ones.
The problem of irrelevant availability can be divided into 3 parts.

1. Suppliers do not provide current information on availability (variants of this problem: the suppliers themselves do not know what they have, suppliers generate a price once a day / week / month, the supplier’s website is synchronized with the base once an hour / day / week, the supplier sends the price is manual and simply does not want to do this more than once a day, the supplier DOES the price manually and simply cannot do it more than once a week / month).
It comes to insanity: a major supplier, from leading in Ukraine by a number of brands, has a b2b website that shows the availability of goods, only the managers of this supplier honestly admit that the information on this site is not accurate. Approximate. Charm.

2. While the information reaches the store, it is already outdated.
Imagine a store in which 40-50 suppliers, about 40,000 products on the site and one or two content editors who must keep the information up to date on a daily basis. I’m not saying that they drive each product manually, they just click the Download and Update supplier price buttons. But all the same there will be a delay between getting the price list and loading the data into the database. But during the day, the supplier can change the status of the presence of hundreds of products.

3. Price aggregators are not eager to update the price more than once a day.
It would seem amazing, because it is in their interest to display current information, provide current data to customers and give traffic to the target buyers. So no - 70% of the price aggregators where we advertised more than once a day for the price will not come. Or such an option - you can update as many times as you like a day, but until the price is updated (15-30 minutes), all the goods in the store disappear from the price aggregator.

How we solved it:
Where possible - automated. If the supplier updates the price once an hour - the robot goes once, downloads it and updates it. If the price is updated once a day, but on the supplier’s website the information on the availability is true in real time - it means the robot goes through all the pages of the site and updates the information in our database. But due to the fact that such robots are more than 10 pieces, and the processor and the channel are not rubber, then such a passage is made no more than once per hour. And within an hour a number of goods may already disappear from availability, the same amount will appear - there will already be an error.
And if we take into account that not all products automatically fall into the necessary section (although this can and should be automated and improve algorithms), then you have to add time to manually transfer goods to the desired section or to manually train the price processing script.

There is still such a moment that suppliers often send high prices in the price list. But really they ship to stores on a cheaper column, which can be seen only under the store's login on the supplier’s website. Therefore, the robot, which goes under the login and pulls the presence, also decides for the store the task of clarifying the real purchase price, which is sometimes crucial for pricing.

Where you can not automate - you have to endure. There are suppliers who obviously have 50% of the goods in the price list - they are not available. But the store is forced to roll out this price on the site and in advertising, because the remaining 50% is painfully good, either at prices or by assortment.
Only half measures are possible here: if there was a request for some product, the manager is charged with the obligation to change the product status to “Out of stock”. But with the next update of the price list from the supplier, the product will again appear in stock.
Why it happens? Suppliers are motivated by the fact that they simply do not have a more recent price.
But when you ask them about the availability of a specific product, they can answer! Therefore, the fact is that many suppliers have not yet turned towards online stores, and are still focused on working with retail chains. That, in general, is not surprising, the Internet here is about 10% of the turnover of electronics.

Here what can be done - it is possible to focus in advertising on suppliers, from which quite fresh information is available on availability. You can make a smaller margin for the goods of these suppliers, you can give more advertising for these goods - and know that the probability of having 95% or more.

You can also collect statistics for each supplier - how many inquiries were made for the goods of this supplier, and how many were returned with the mark Not available. And based on this, calculate an empirical "Probability of Availability". But there is one drawback, one and the same supplier can give good performance for six months, and then suddenly deteriorate very much - either because of a deficit, or if they have implemented a new ERP, but it is buggy. And six months later, again, fine. Those. This approach can be used, but carefully, not trusting him completely.

How to deal with price aggregators is hard to say. Of those with whom we worked, I would like to mention Yandex.market and Hotline, as well as Ava.ua, who try to update the store information more often.
But if the price aggregator does not want to update the price list of the store more often - then the situation is when the store pays for clicks on a product that is almost out of stock for a day. This can be used as an argument in negotiations with the aggregators - why should we pay you as much as others, and update them much less often?
In general, how this should be resolved normally, and I think price aggregators will come to this sooner or later:
Once a day, the store must transmit the full price for synchronization, and during the day - to bombard the price aggregator with small XML requests - this product has appeared, this one has disappeared, the price has changed. So that as soon as the store has the latest information, it can update the data in the advertisement.

Summing up , I would like to say that the current situation with suppliers simply does not allow shops to keep 100% relevant information on the site and in advertising.
But you can and you should strive for this 100%. Still, suppliers are gradually beginning to understand the specifics of online trading and sometimes even meet them. This is a very slow process, but it goes. I think colleagues from Russia will confirm that many of their suppliers already give relevant information in real time.
In the same place where the customer ordered a product that is not available - the task of the manager is to smooth out the negative impression as much as possible. Offer analogues, explain the situation, check with the supplier when the product does appear - maybe it is available on request.
If a customer ordered through the basket - in the near future, call him back and tell him, saying sorry, there is no.
If the client is informed about this after 10 minutes - he is unlikely to be very upset.
If after a day, when he is already waiting for a call from a courier - and they call him from the store and say that he doesn’t, without even apologizing for the delay and inaccurate information on the site - the client will be very unhappy, this cannot be allowed.

In conclusion, I would like to ask who has extensive experience with contextual advertising, how are things going with the relevance of ads?