James, a furniture manufacturer in London, runs a thriving business. His business sells to furniture showrooms, and they also have their own stores that sell directly to end customers.
Quite recently, his Shopify store made a high value sale of a handcrafted velvet sofa. However, in reality for this particular product, James’ manufacturing unit had an exclusive deal with a furniture brand and hence, couldn’t be sold directly to consumers. However, on his shopify store the customers can see all the available inventory, both B2B and B2C.
Now James has two choices for this order: Either break the contract and pay up a fortune in reparations, or send the dreaded “We are sorry, we’re actually out of stock on this product” email to the customer who had placed the order.
Just to confirm here, inventory availability was not the issue here, but it was shown to the wrong person.
This is the “In Stock” illusion – a trap that serious Shopify merchants fall into every day.
The Solution: Customer Specific Inventory Visibility
Almost all e-commerce stores operate on a “first come, first served” basis across all their locations. While this works pretty well for small shops with a very limited number of inventory locations or for exclusive B2C businesses, it becomes a huge liability for B2B businesses like James’ with multiple warehouses which are also selling to end customers through physical storefronts spreading across multiple cities.
The solution to this problem is to control “who sees what”, using the new Customer Rules feature for Multi-Location Inventory. It is not just about having stock; it’s about Inventory Logic.
What is Customer Specific Inventory Visibility
Merchants on shopify can
- Add customer tags to a group of their existing customers
- Put visibility filter for each customer group, i.e. what locations can the group see the inventory of
Using customer tags, a merchant can essentially create “group based viewing” for their inventory. Instead of showing each inventory they have to every person visiting the online Shopify Store, the “Customer Rules” dynamically filter the inventory availability based on the shopper’s profile, or “Customer Tag”.
When a customer logs in, the system will check their “customer tag” – perhaps they are a “Wholesale Partner,” a “London Local,” or a “VIP Member” – and instantly maps them to the physical store or warehouse inventory that they are allowed to see.
In James’ case, this would allow his Shopify Store to only show certain warehouse’s inventory to “B2B customers”.
How Does the “Customer Rule” Engine Works
The process is a simple, three-step bridge between a customer’s profile and your warehouse shelves:
- Segmentation using Tags: Merchants assign tags in Shopify (e.g. “wholesale”, “distributor”, “Chelsea city” etc.) to their customers.
- Mapping the Location: Using the Multi Location Inventory widget, that specific customer tag can be linked to a specific warehouse or store.
- Enforcing the Purchase: When a tagged customer logs into the website, the product page widget checks the customer’s “customer tag”. The website dynamically updates such that the customer only sees the stock available at their assigned location. Most importantly, the app even enforces this at the “Add to Cart” level, i.e. if the specific warehouse is out of stock, the purchase is blocked, even if other locations may have the said product
What About The Customers Without Customer Tag ?
Now that we understand the concept of customer tags and using them, what of the customer who are not given a customer tag by the merchant ? This is where the “Default Location” setting of this feature plays an important role.
For a customer who has not been given a customer tag, the merchant can define a set of “Default Locations.” This makes sure that the general customer without any customer tag is routed to the main retail fulfillment centers which have been set as part of default locations, while your specialized stock remains untouched and reserved for those customers who need it most.
Why “Controlled Restrictions” are the Key to Scaling
When you think about it, the idea of putting restrictions on customers freely buying your products sounds counterintuitive. However, for many business models, it is the only way to maintain a good customer experience.
- Separated B2B and B2C Flows: Using this feature, you can finally run wholesale and retail from the same Shopify store. Now these two groups won’t buy from each other’s inventory.
- Local Fulfillment: Now a customer from a particular region won’t be ordering from an inventory in a region that can’t ship to them.
- End of “Sorry” Emails: By blocking purchases when a specific location is empty, you drastically eliminate the “Stock Error” messages to the customer, thus improving the customer experience.
Creating a Smarter Shopify Store
James drastically changed things for his business by implementing “Customer rules” using “Customer Tags”. What James did was that he created a customer tag named “B2B” and tagged his B2B customers with this tag. Now when a B2B tagged customer visits his Shopify store, they would only see inventory from those warehouses which are meant to sell to B2B customers.
The next time an end customer visited his site, his website saw that customer wasn’t tagged and hence, routed that customer to the “default” London store location. If the sofa wasn’t in this default London location, the site simply displayed “Restocking Soon” for that customer—even if there were fifty sofas available in a warehouse for B2B selling..
It looks like James may have lost a sale, but that is definitely not the case. James did not lose a sale, he saved his brand’s reputation.As Shopify evolves into a multi location powerhouse, the most successful merchants won’t be those with the most inventory. They will be the ones who mastered the art of showing the right product to the right person at the right location, and this can be done very easily with Kark’s Multi Location Inventory Management app on Shopify App store.
FAQ
1. What is the “In Stock” illusion in Shopify?
In Stock illusion is a situation where stock is ‘in-stock’ within a particular location and is not readily available to a particular customer and results in order fulfillment failure or inefficiency.
2. What is customer-specific inventory visibility?
Specialized inventory visibility enables merchants to determine which inventory is viewed by a customer depending on tags to enhance ecommerce inventory management and minimize fulfillment mistakes.
3. How do customer tags improve Shopify inventory management?
Customer tags allow dividing users and displaying only the relevant inventory, which makes the Shopify inventory management process more precise and avoids cross-location stock problems.
4. How does this reduce Shopify inventory problems?
It solves the Shopify inventory issues by avoiding the cases of ordering goods which are not available at a specific site and other cases of mismatched stock and unsuccessful orders.
5. Why is controlled inventory visibility important for scaling?
The controlled visibility prevents significant inventory management errors, local fulfillment, and assists the businesses to scale efficiently with improved Shopify stock management.
