There really is not gonna be a good way to have a completely accurate inventory system. Knowbody is stocking 200000 parts in their warehouse, most companies like that go through the WPS, Marshall, Parts Unlmited, and Tucker Rocky catalogs and pick and choose what they want to stock and drop ship the rest.. Even Fox, Oakley, GoPro, etc. some of the largest brands out there dont have a perfect real time system. We order product all the time that says its in stock but its not. You mentioned Revzilla, they do not even stock everything. They drop ship a TON of product, there is actually an hour
Long interview with Anthony Bucci, the owner, on how they do this. You may have just gotten lucky with products saying they are available to you. The only real time system that would be out there, which still would not be perfect would be a weight management one. Where when the product was lifted off the shelf it took it out of inventory. Even this would not be fool proof, and lets face it way too costly to do. So while people may say they have inventory correct and accurate because they update their inventory multiple times a week, that still does not mean they are real time. All it takes is ten minutes after companies updating their stock levels to have one dealer buy that said product out, then their work is already null. Like we said, knowbody stocks 200000 sku's, it just doesnt happen in our industry and only 1 or 2 people in the moto world do. So when people say they have accurate inventory they are just trusting their updates.
Also to touch on the comparison with Revzilla. You are never gonn have the systems and setup that the moto world has. Snow sports are just too seasonal and small. A ton of the moto companies make re-orders multiple times a year from china and since their season is year round taking a month to get it from china does not mean much. If Klim, MF, 509 etc has to wait a month in december to get a new order, by the time they get it back in stock and we can update inventory the season is over.
We work super hard to stay on top of things and be as close as we can to accurate but sometimes thats just life with online sales. We have multiple people buy the same product everyday, sometimes within seconds of each other. And it will generally take five minutes to finish a checkout. So while it may have been in stock when u ordered or clicked buy things could change in that five minutes. We are always open to suggestions to better our service though so feel free to bounce questions or comments off of us!
