Availability signals
Public availability is not inventory truth
An ecommerce page can show that a product appeared available at a particular source, time, seller and delivery context. It rarely proves how many units exist, where they sit, how quickly they sell, or whether the same state applies across a market.
Six evidence classes that should not be collapsed
- Listing presence: a page or card was observed; purchase availability and current assortment status remain unknown.
- Public availability label: the source displayed a state, possibly dependent on seller, location, delivery mode, variant or cached data.
- Purchase and delivery context: seller, postcode, fulfilment mode, quantity and basket result strengthen only that public transaction observation.
- Repeated observations: a pattern raises confidence but does not become internal inventory or sell-through.
- First-party inventory: ERP, warehouse, retailer or authorised partner data is a separate evidence class with its own latency and scope.
- First-party sales: demand, velocity and lost sales need transactional or otherwise justified data.
Record the observation before interpreting it
- Exact URL, source, timestamp and timezone.
- Market, locale and postcode where relevant.
- Selected model/variant, seller and fulfilment identity.
- Exact displayed wording and any basket/delivery test.
- Screenshot or evidence reference where lawful and useful.
- Previous observation, confidence and unresolved context.
Keep publicly shown unavailable, listing not observed, page missing, access blocked and unknown as separate states.
Use the signal as a verification queue
Recheck a high-priority SKU in the correct local context, confirm whether seller or fulfilment changed, compare the state across agreed sources and timestamps, and request authorised first-party context where it exists.
A high-impact but low-confidence event deserves fast verification—not a confident commercial claim.
Claims this observation cannot support
- Quantity on hand or warehouse/network stock truth.
- Sell-through, lost revenue or demand.
- Complete market availability.
- Permanent delisting or discontinuation.
- Real-time status or causal impact on price and ranking.
A bounded Pulse use case
A Pulse pilot can monitor a small agreed set of public sources and products, record timestamped states, highlight material changes and state what remains unknown. It is a managed decision workflow—not an exhaustive inventory system, a real-time platform or a substitute for retailer data.
The useful output is not a larger alert count. It is a shorter, traceable list of observations that deserve verification and an explicit log of the noise that did not.