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Convincing them of this could be difficult. The absolute only idea that I had which might work is to provide businesses with 100% free automatic (rfid or whate
by tibbon 16y ago
Convincing them of this could be difficult.
The absolute only idea that I had which might work is to provide businesses with 100% free automatic (rfid or whatever based) inventory systems of whatever size they need. Yes, that is a large expense.
However, in exchange for the free inventory system, you get access to their data and the ability to post it online. You give people the ability (but don't force them to) buy the item from their mobile phone/computer quickly and easily, so when they show up they have a zero balance and are ready to go. Then you take a 2-5% cut of that (just a hair more than credit card transactions) for the online business referral.
TL;DR- Give business owners something expensive and massively valuable in return for their data, and the ability to let consumers buy their items through your referral system online.
- pavel_lishin 16y agoI agree. Putting your entire stock online can take a lot of manpower, depending on who you are. (Best Buy? Probably fairly trivial. Grandma's and Grandpa's Little Shop of Flowers? Gotta hire more grandkids.) Unless the time and money spent on the effort is going to pay off, and pay off quick, a store isn't going to bother.
- sethwoodworth 16y agoI've done db work for mom&pop stores, small-town hardware shop, etc. You would be surprised how much of inventory is digitized even at a small place. The major work wouldn't be in manpower, but in hooking up the db to something that can index it.
- Kalob 16y agoWhy just not parse/index all the products from stores websites and verify in-stock real-time when making a search via script or something (given that in-stock availability is indicated). Using this approach you can collect product/location data from more than a million stores I would guess. No?
- tmcneal 16y agoReal-time inventory tracking for as large a company as Best Buy is "fairly trivial"? For large companies, it is a multi-million dollar investment to build a warehouse management system capable of showing near real-time levels of inventory. Besides the capital costs, companies can have very specific workflows for managing inventory levels. Also things like drop-ship vendors and sourcing items from multiple sources can make it extremely difficult to calculate or predict inventory levels prior to a sale.