Real-Time Stock & Availability Alerts for a D2C Brand

Client Snapshot

A UK D2C personal-care brand also sold through 6 third-party retailers.

The Challenge

The brand's products regularly went out of stock at retailer level — and nobody told them. A retailer showing "out of stock" on a hero SKU is lost revenue and, worse, lost search ranking on that retailer's internal search, which is slow to recover.

They were finding out days later, usually from a customer complaint. There was also a second, quieter problem: unauthorized sellers listing their products, which they had no systematic way to detect.

Objectives

• Monitor availability of 180 SKUs across 6 retailers
• Alert within 1 hour of a stock status change
• Flag any seller not on the authorized list

The Actowiz Approach

Availability sounds simple and isn't: retailers signal stock state in wildly inconsistent ways — an explicit badge on one site, a disabled add-to-cart button on another, a silently missing size option on a third. We built per-retailer availability detection rather than a single generic rule, and validated each against known in-stock and out-of-stock examples.

Change detection compared each run to the previous state and alerted only on transitions, not on every run — which is the difference between a useful alert and an ignored one.

Seller names were checked against the client's authorized-seller list, with anything unrecognized flagged for review.

Results

• 180 SKUs × 6 retailers monitored
• Stock-out detection time reduced from 2–4 days to under 2 hours
• 23 unauthorized seller listings surfaced in the first month
• 97% accuracy on availability state vs manual verification

Compliance Note

Public listing data. No purchasing automation, no cart manipulation.