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Comment by pavel_lishin | Hacker News Reader

I agree. Putting your entire stock online can take a lot of manpower, depending on who you are. (Best Buy? Probably fairly trivial. Grandma's and Grandpa's Little Shop of Flowers? Gotta hire more grandkids.)

Unless the time and money spent on the effort is going to pay off, and pay off quick, a store isn't going to bother.

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I've done db work for mom&pop stores, small-town hardware shop, etc. You would be surprised how much of inventory is digitized even at a small place.

The major work wouldn't be in manpower, but in hooking up the db to something that can index it.

Why just not parse/index all the products from stores websites and verify in-stock real-time when making a search via script or something (given that in-stock availability is indicated). Using this approach you can collect product/location data from more than a million stores I would guess. No?

Real-time inventory tracking for as large a company as Best Buy is "fairly trivial"?

For large companies, it is a multi-million dollar investment to build a warehouse management system capable of showing near real-time levels of inventory. Besides the capital costs, companies can have very specific workflows for managing inventory levels. Also things like drop-ship vendors and sourcing items from multiple sources can make it extremely difficult to calculate or predict inventory levels prior to a sale.

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