Why indicate stock levels?
Availability can be indicated for all items in the Mercateo shop. Customers tend to respond very positively to the indication of available items, and would prefer suppliers offering an availability indication over other suppliers not offering this convenience if the item is sold by several suppliers. Customers may also place purchase orders for a larger quantity of the item than what is currently in stock. Customers may also place a purchase order for an item where the availability is set to “0”; these items will be shown as “0 items in stock”.
Availability of items will continuously change as a result of sales or deliveries. Thus, to show the customer the correct, currently available, quantity of items in stock, inventories must be updated at regular intervals. Availability is an additional piece of information and cannot be provided in the catalogue. Catalogues must be updated separately.
For availability request, Mercateo AG offers its suppliers several options: data interchange by means of CSV or XML files transmitted via FTP (file transfer protocol) as well as a HTTP request. For legal reasons, availability data must not include any prices, regardless of the version selected. The supplier selects a version which would then be used for the availability request.