Optimizing Sales Channel Allocation: Strategies for a Successful Omnichannel Company

Doona is a prominent car seat company with an exclusive patent that distributes its products through multiple sales channels in the United States.

• Shopify

• Specialty stores

• EDI trade partners (like Nordstrom, Dillard, etc.)

• Online web shops

The company business practice is to allocate for each channel, a predefined part of the free stock,

When a shortage for one allocation happens, the sales VP decides to shift allocations between the channels ("Re-allocating").

When we started to run the ERP system, NetSuite didn't have such a feature, so we developed our logic to support the allocation strategy.

In 2024, NetSuite released the sales allocation feature, which seems quite shallow.

In essence, this feature maintains records and "transactions" about the usage of each allocation, and the available stock in each one, but it lacks any "envelope".

So we developed our envelope for two aspects:

• The sales order logic

• The re-allocation process

In 2024 we started also to run two warehouses, on the East Coast and the West Coast, so now we maintain the allocation for each sales channel and each warehouse.

In the sales order we check, by the customer, the available stock in his allocation.

We ship[ from the warehouse we have stock, and in case, we have in both, we decide on the warehouse by the shipping address, to minimize the shipping cost.

If we do not have sufficient allocation available, we will not approve the order.

The decision goes to the sales VP who can reallocate stock between the channels.

To achieve this, we designed a user interface that is user-friendly but not in the style of NetSuite, enabling the VP to perform his tasks with optimal efficiency.

For instance, on this screen, we can observe that the "specialty" allocation consists of 119 units with no pending quantity, whereas other locations are out of stock and have pending orders.

So the sales VP shifted 60 units to the Chains allocation, and 40 to the allocation for our portal customers.

Behind the scenes, our program updates the underlined tables - what NetSuite calls "reservation transactions".