Local Store Support
The availability field in your feed indicates whether a product is in stock or not, but this only represents availability across your entire inventory and cannot indicate availability at local stores. You can provide inStockAt or oosStockAt fields to indicate availability at each store, which would allow you to support local store pickup or purchases.
Local store support enables you to:
- Allow immediate order fulfillment, such as for last minute gifts, missing tools for a DIY project, or to try before buying.
- Save on delivery costs, especially for customers who can pick up bulk purchases or large items at your local store.
- Provide convenience compared to home delivery, as the customer does not have to worry about being at home to receive a delivery.
- Open the possibility for customers who visit your local store to purchase additional items while in store.
Implementing store support
To implement local store support, you must provide local store availability in your product feed and modify your API calls.
Bloomreach does not provide a feature to plot your store locations or calculate the distance from the store to the user’s location. If you would like to implement such features, you will have to develop the functionality independently. The steps below only outline how you can apply that functionality to the Bloomreach results set.
Feed fields for local store data
Provide local store availability in a inStockAt or oosStockAt field. You may also use both fields if that better serves your needs.
| Field | Description | Example value |
|---|---|---|
| inStockAt | List of store locations where product is available. Provide as a list of store ID codes, and delimit values with a | . | store_code1|store_code2|store_code3 |
| oosStockAt | List of store locations where product is not available. Provide as a list of store ID codes, and delimit values with a | . | store_code1|store_code2|store_code3 |
API
The recommended components of local store support are as follows:
- Provide a function similar to "Find a store near you".
- Identify stores by their store code.
- Get the user’s location (either have a method to determine the user's location or allow the user to state their location).
- Display a list of stores nearest to the user's location.
- Allow the user to select a store for pickup or purchase.
On your search and category pages, you can provide an additional feature to filter results to only those available in the customer's nearest store(s). For example, you could add a filter to your API calls:
&fq=inStockAt:"store_code1"
&fq=inStockAt:("store_code1" or "store_code2" or "store_code3")
Updated about 1 year ago