Real-time inventory visibility for every location
Live inventory state for every SKU at every location — published as events your storefront, marketing, and operations can react to within minutes.
The problem
A multi-location retailer with 200 locations and 5,000 SKUs has a million SKU-location situations to track. Most inventory systems can tell you how much you have. Few of them publish state changes — in stock, low, out, back in stock, pre-order — as events the rest of your stack can react to. So product pages stay stale until the next nightly rebuild, marketing keeps emailing about an item that just sold out, ops finds out about a sellout from a complaint. Inventory management products (NetSuite, Cin7, Zoho Inventory, Fishbowl, Lightspeed, Brightpearl, QuickBooks Commerce) hold the data. Multi-location inventory platforms (Extensiv/Skubana, Linnworks, Stitch, TradeGecko, Dear, Unleashed, Veeqo) hold it across stores. Enterprise visibility platforms (IBM Sterling, Aera, Manhattan Active, o9, Blue Yonder) provide real-time visibility at enterprise price points. ERP modules (SAP, Oracle, Dynamics 365, Infor, Acumatica) are part of broader supply chain platforms. What none of them ship is a per-location, per-SKU state monitor that publishes change events the rest of your stack can subscribe to within minutes — at a price multi-location operators can absorb.
What success looks like
Every SKU at every location is monitored continuously across five inventory states: in-stock, low-stock, out-of-stock, back-in-stock, and pre-order. State changes publish as events within minutes. Your product pages update. Your marketing automation suppresses sends for out-of-stock items. Your operations team gets early signal on sellouts. Compliance rules — lot tracking, expiration dates, state-by-state inventory disclosure — are respected on the data. Lost revenue from inventory-stale shopping experiences drops from around 12% to under 1.5%.
How most operators solve this today
Several categories hold inventory data. None of them publish per-location state-change events that the rest of a multi-location operator's stack can react to in minutes:
Inventory management (NetSuite Inventory, Cin7 Core, Zoho Inventory, Fishbowl, Lightspeed Retail, Brightpearl, QuickBooks Commerce)
Free to $150,000+/year
Strong at holding inventory data. State changes are not published as events.
Multi-location inventory platforms (Extensiv/Skubana, Linnworks, Stitch Labs, TradeGecko, Dear, Unleashed, Veeqo)
Free to $5,000+/month
Multi-store tracking. Event publication and downstream integration are limited.
Enterprise real-time visibility (IBM Sterling, Aera, Manhattan Active Inventory, o9, Blue Yonder)
$30,000 to $500,000+/year
Genuine real-time visibility. Enterprise-priced and enterprise-implementation. Most multi-location operators cannot justify the cost.
ERP modules (SAP S/4HANA, Oracle NetSuite, Microsoft Dynamics 365 Supply Chain, Infor CloudSuite, Acumatica)
$1,000 to $500,000+/year
Inventory is one module of many. Event publication varies by ERP.
Build it in-house
Senior engineer ($130-220k) + ops manager ($80-130k) + ongoing maintenance
Custom integration to your POS, WMS, and supplier feeds. Works for v1. Maintenance scales with location count.
What changes when this is an agent skill
The monitor reads from your POS, your warehouse system, your supplier feeds, and your reorder-point and safety-stock logic in real time. It tracks each SKU at each location across five states. When a state changes — a sellout, a restock, a low-stock breach, a pre-order open — the event publishes within minutes. Subscribers include your product pages (which update copy and CTA), your marketing automation (which suppresses sends for out-of-stock items), your customer service tooling (which warns reps before they promise something that just sold out), and your operations dashboard (which sees patterns early). Lot tracking, expiration dates, and state-by-state inventory disclosure rules are respected at the data layer. Every state change is logged with the source feeds that produced it, so ops and compliance can audit any change.
Agents that include this skill
Skills live inside agent rentals. To get this skill in production, hire any of the agents below — context-tuning at onboarding is included in the first month.
Inventory-Aware Retail Marketing Agent
Watches SKU stock state and fans out coordinated ad-gating, storefront, email, SMS, social, and PDP actions across every channel.
FAQ
- How is this different from NetSuite, Cin7, or Lightspeed?
- Those hold inventory data. We publish per-location state changes as events the rest of your stack can react to in minutes. We integrate with whichever inventory system you already use.
- How is this different from enterprise visibility platforms like Manhattan, Blue Yonder, or IBM Sterling?
- Those are genuine real-time platforms at enterprise prices. We deliver per-location state change events at a multi-location-operator price point without a year-long implementation.
- Which states does it track?
- In-stock, low-stock, out-of-stock, back-in-stock, and pre-order — per SKU per location.
- How fast do state changes publish?
- Within minutes of the underlying system reflecting the change. Subscribers can react in near-real-time.
- What subscribes to the events?
- Your product pages, your marketing automation, your customer service tooling, your operations dashboard. Any system that can consume webhooks or events can subscribe.
- How are lot tracking and expiration dates handled?
- Where the underlying inventory system carries them, they flow through. Regulated verticals (FDA, food, pharma) get the data they need for compliance.
- How are state-by-state inventory disclosure rules respected?
- Encoded once per state and applied automatically. Locations under specific rules get the right disclosures on the data.
- Does this work for catalogs with fewer than 100 SKUs?
- Yes. There is no minimum catalog size.