Whether it is e-commerce or retail, all sales are Number List sold on the basis of SKU. Why is it SKU? Because SKU is the smallest stock-keeping unit, the essence of e-commerce sales is the flow of inventory. We purchase commodity inventory from suppliers and put it in our warehouse, and then sell it to our users through the online platform of e-commerce. This process of circulation is the "migration" of inventory.
The entire migration process of inventory is very long, and the circulation of inventory is actually the circulation of commodity property rights. Let's first look at the route of inventory "migration", that is, the process of inventory circulation. Before talking about the process, let's talk about the division of inventory by the e-commerce platform. From the overall use, it is roughly divided into three parts: sales, performance, and procurement. As shown in the figure:
Sales: Realize all inventory operations that users place an order to purchase.
Fulfillment: Complete the fulfillment operation for the inventory quantity promised by the sales action.
Purchasing: Prepare in advance for the quantity of inventory required to fulfill the contract, and also estimate the quantity of purchases through sales data.
In terms of business relationship, sales behavior, as the top business layer, directly determines the changes in purchasing and contract performance. Purchasing, as the downstream of contract performance, determines the demand for procurement based on the performance of the contract. From this, various types of inventory are derived, and different types of inventory are mutually transformed through the agreed processing process, and all the transformations of inventory originate from the actual operation behavior of offline inventory.
1. Inventory processing process
The inventory processing process is mainly to reasonably connect all the operational behaviors of the three parts of sales, contract performance and procurement, so as to realize the conversion between different types of inventory. According to the originator, it can be divided into inventory processing by sales and inventory processing by non-sales.