Step 5: Inventory Verification

Introduction and Business Impact

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If you are onboarding as a Trusted Partner, you are given access to the POS APIs, which are specialized APIs that eventually enables your newly onboarded merchants to skip inventory verification for faster onboarding. To begin this process you need to submit five inventory checks for 5 merchants. The API that is used to submit inventory is pos.inventory.

The process is straightforward, you need first to provide inventory verification contact details for each merchant, these steps are found in Linking Account to POS LFP Provider, using the liasettings.setverificationcontact or front-end.

The retailer then schedules and conducts inventory verifications with their merchants. After the first five retailers have been verified, you become a trusted partner.

Inventory verification is required for the first 5 retailers only. Retailers are asked to verify the price and availability of up to 100 items (max 3 stores per merchant). Photos is requested for approx 20% of listed items.

Verification Steps

1. Review Data Quality Report

   After requesting inventory verification, Google share a Data Quality Report. Review the report and make any required modifications.

2. Agree to which stores are checked

   If required, Google enable the store managers to validate actual in-store inventory against the data provided in the feeds using a simple web form.

3. Provide a time window and loop in local store manager

   A Google team works with you to schedule time-appropriate verifications. Provide complete contact information for each store manager and communicate checks upfront helps both the Google team and the store teams.

Tip: To enable additional countries to the original set, simply make sure the data ingestion is consistent and in-line with the previous enabled countries.

Important: If using POS API endpoint to deliver data, continue to do so. This way no additional checks are required and the new countries can be enabled quickly. If the data ingestion mechanism changes, a new set of 5 inventory checks would be required again.

Tech Guidance

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Once you are ready for verification, you can either do it from the Front End UI, or do it from the API, liasettings.requestinventoryverification. This API takes three parameters:

• merchantId: the MCA Aggregator ID
• accountId: the account id of the sub account or external client account.
• country: the country of where the inventory checks take place.

Tech Tips

• Ensure that you have your merchants ready for these inventory checks.
• Perform regression testing first to ensure that your data synchronization method is returning the correct price, availability, and at least 20% of the products in your local inventory contain a photo.