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Merchant Overview

Merchant Inventory Service Overview​

The Merchant Inventory Service is a comprehensive platform designed to support businesses efficiently, managing their product inventory, sales, customer data, forecasting, reporting, and more.

This service aims to provide merchants with a suite of features that empower them to streamline their operations and enhance customer satisfaction. Thereby providing support for both B2B (Business-to-Business) and B2C (Business-to-Customer) interactions, facilitating transactions between suppliers and merchants in B2B scenarios and between merchants and customers in B2C scenarios.

Features of the service include:

  • Product Catalogue Management:
    • Stock/Restock Capability: Enables merchants to manage their product inventory by restocking items from the internal inventory/product catalogue.
    • Product Information Management: Merchants can store and manage essential product information such as SKU numbers, descriptions, prices, and images.
    • Inventory Tracking: Provides real-time tracking of inventory levels, allowing merchants to update quantities as products are sold or received.
    • Product Search: Offers a flexible and efficient search mechanism to locate products within the merchant's inventory quickly.
  • Sales Management: The system will enable businesses to manage sales, including payment status, processing payments and managing inventory.
    • Payment Status: Provides tools for managing payment status and processing payments.
    • Inventory Management: Allows businesses to manage inventory levels as sales occur efficiently.
  • Online and Offline Sales:
    • The Merchant Inventory Service provides a flexible approach to sales, supporting both online and offline sales channels. Merchants can use the sale endpoint to facilitate transactions in various sales environments.
  • Customer Management:
    • Customer Data Management: Enables businesses to manage customer accounts and securely store customer information.
  • Forecasting and Reordering:
    • Inventory Forecasting: Utilizes historical sales data to forecast inventory needs.
    • Automated Reordering: Offers the ability to automatically or manually reorder items when inventory falls below a predefined threshold. This feature is closely connected to the restocking capability.
  • Reporting and Analytics:
    • Data Analysis: Provides businesses with tools to generate reports and analyze data, including metrics like customer acquisition cost and lifetime customer value.
    • Sales Metrics for Data Users: The Merchant Inventory Service generates sales metrics and data that data users can access and utilise. These metrics provide valuable insights into sales performance and can be used for reporting and analysis.
  • Configuration:
    • Client Setup: Offers a configuration contract to set up clients for using the merchant inventory service.
  • Multi-Channel Support:
    • Sales Channel Management: Allows businesses to manage inventory across various sales channels, including online marketplaces, social media platforms, and physical stores.
  • Merchant User:
    • User Access Control: Ensures that only authorized merchant users can access and modify inventory and sales data.
  • Notifications:
    • Event Notifications: Provides a notification system to alert merchants and other relevant entities about important events within the inventory system.
  • Integrations:
    • Wallet Service: Integrates with the wallet service to notify the merchant inventory upon successful payments.
    • Internal Inventory Service: Products are created from the internal inventory service. The merchant inventory service notifies the internal inventory service about new products that do not exist in the internal inventory.
  • Purchase Order Management:
    • The system supports creating and managing purchase orders, allowing merchants to place orders for products from suppliers. Purchase orders can be tracked and managed through the service.
  • Mapping Relationship between Buyer and Seller:
    • In B2B scenarios, the service includes functionality for mapping and managing the relationship between buyers (merchants) and sellers (suppliers). This mapping ensures that orders and transactions are correctly attributed.
  • Product Promotion:
    • Merchants can use the service to promote their products to potential customers. This feature may include the ability to highlight featured products, offer discounts, and run promotional campaigns.
  • Sabi Warehouse Integration:
    • The service is integrated with Sabi's warehouse, enabling seamless coordination of inventory and sales operations with Sabi's physical storage facilities.

Dependencies:

  • Wallet Service: The merchant inventory service is dependent on the SABI wallet service to send and receive payments and notifications of successful transactions.
  • Internal Inventory Service: Products are sourced from the internal inventory service. The merchant inventory service notifies the internal inventory service of new products that are not present in the internal inventory.
  • User Service: The merchant inventory service also makes use of the SABI User Management/Service to obtain user details and facilitate the creation of new user accounts for merchants.