Shoppable relies on the data that merchants send to us. At times they do not include every product they feature on their site.
Typically, merchants will include all of their products in the catalog that they share with Shoppable, but occasionally, they may opt to share a portion of their catalog.
Shoppable receives product details from each merchant with their product availability and current price. Shoppable's technology runs this information on demand, meaning as soon as the merchant sends it to us, we will process the product data and update it in our catalog.
Depending on the merchant, this feed may be updated once to several times per day (Note that by using our Product Function available on DTC Lite v5, this information can be displayed on your site page in real-time).
Reasons why you may see a product on a merchant's site, but is not available to add to the cart, are:
- Merchants may not include every product they feature in their feeds to us.
- Once a brand-new product goes live on shelves and online, there may still be a lag in adding it to their feeds. If you are trying to promote a new product that you can't find in the catalog, please reach out to your Customer Success Manager.
- The product must be 'shippable' (I.e.: perishable, very large items, etc., may be classified by the retailer as an in-store purchase only. Shoppable does not support perishable products in the universal checkout today.)
- The product must be available from the retailer itself and not from a marketplace seller (e.g.: Walmart features items sold and shipped from Walmart and from marketplace sellers. They do not track their marketplace sellers’ inventory and therefore do not include this in their feeds.)
- The item may be very close to going temporarily out of stock or might be at its “end of life.” Merchants may choose to remove it from the feed while a very limited buffer of inventory remains. They may only offer it in-store to better control the depletion.
- The recent global supply chain issues for merchants have made managing their product feeds as challenging as managing stock on their shelves. There has been more variability with out-of-stock issues in recent months.
- Please do not rely on inventory information if you are working in a staging environment. Since that data is used for testing purposes, the inventory on Staging is not updated as frequently as in a production environment.