The other day, I was chatting with a customer who said something that transformed my view on inventory. He said: “If I run out of stock on Amazon, I'm screwed. But I love running out of stock on Shopify.”
That’s right. He used the ‘L’ word to refer to stockouts. A problem known for contributing to nearly $2 trillion in inventory costs. Clearly, I needed to know more.
Managing inventory is arguably the hardest task of any retail brand. That is especially true for e-commerce, where sales, advertising, payments and even the customers are digital and can be managed with the click of a button, while inventory is still physical and needs real-world interactions to be produced, moved and stored.
With the rise of generative AI like ChatGPT, Bard and Adobe Firefly, there is great potential for DTC brands to increase their productivity using the power of machine learning.
