Inventory Visibility public APIs and scenarios
As previously mentioned, a key functionality of Inventory Visibility is the ability for your external systems to make calls to and from the add-in by using a public REST API. Inventory Visibility offers several different APIs. However, they can be divided into four main interaction types:
Posting on-hand inventory changes from external systems
Setting or overriding on-hand inventory quantities externally
Posting reservation events externally
Querying current on-hand quantities externally
The following scenarios describe situations that would necessitate some of the Inventory Visibility public APIs.
Online retail store opens first brick-and-mortar
You work for a retailer that has previously only been online. As such, their orders have been carried out in the same system, at least for now. Your company has recently opened its first brick-and-mortar location, and now you have a new channel in your retail point-of-sale devices.
As a result, your company can use the Inventory Visibility APIs. Because you're using the onhand and onhand/bulk APIs, your online retail system and your in-store point-of-sale system can write on-hand change events to Inventory Visibility. Therefore, you can avoid overselling in your online and in-person locations by enforcing an accurate on-hand inventory amount. Enforce accuracy by writing your on-hand changes to Inventory Visibility as they occur.
Manufacturer with government contracts
You work for a manufacturing company that has recently acquired some government contracts. Because your company has recently entered the government contract industry, your government clients are your highest priority. However, your government clients require that you use a separate enterprise resource planning (ERP) system to account for their orders.
With Inventory Visibility, this situation isn't a problem. You can use the allocation API to allocate and reallocate inventory and to consume allocated quantities and query for inventory that's available to allocate. You can set up your initial allocation from the new ERP system by using the allocate API. Then, you can use the query API to continuously check for inventory that's available to allocate. Additionally, you'll use the consume API as you regularly deduct or use the allocated quantity. With these APIs, you can keep better track of customer satisfaction for your high-value clients.
For a full list of the APIs that are available and more syntax-level details, see Inventory Visibility public APIs.