Digital Commerce 101: Understanding availability

Details the importance of product availability for businesses selling on e-commerce platforms.

It seems self-evident: if you have no product available to sell, then you don’t have a retailing business. It has always been so.

But in e-commerce, the right balance between having enough stock to meet demand, and having excess stock that must be stored and paid for, is much harder to achieve than in physical commerce. And the cost of getting it wrong is far greater.

In bricks-and mortar retailing, if a product goes out of stock (OOS) for a day, a brand typically loses that day’s sales. In e-commerce, however, the losses can run deeper and last much longer...

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