Just like you, Locally wants to help retailers reach their full potential. We work with hundreds of select brands to show shoppers when an item is in stock at a store nearby, driving foot traffic to local stores. A key part of this is helping retailers show their in-stock inventory. Retailers who are showing their in-stock inventory on Locally's tools get greater exposure and engagement from potential shoppers than retailers who don't display their product offerings.
Locally's "Premier Connection" partnership program highlights Point of Sale systems who help us make it easy for retailers to connect their live inventory to Locally and join thousands of others retailers engaging shoppers on high-traffic sites like Patagonia.com, YETI.com, Salomon.com, BrooksRunning.com, and countless more. Plus, we'll feature your POS system as a Premier Connection in our Knowledge Base for retailers and in our marketing materials at dozens of trade shows. Locally is actively seeking partnerships with POS systems in North America, Europe, and Japan.
Interested? It's simple! Check out what it would take below and introduce yourself to us at POS@locally.com. We can't wait to start working with you!
What's required to become a Premier Connection?
We'll work together to build a repeatable, automated connection that makes it easy for any mutual retailer to activate live inventory on Locally. At a minimum, this means helping us create simple, step-by-step instructions that retailers can follow to setup and automate a Locally inventory report using your POS. Or, even better, this means building a formal integration that a retailer can activate in just a few clicks.
What's in an inventory report?
At a minimum, we need to receive:
- UPC/EAN
- Quantity on hand. Note: if no quantity is included, it will be assumed that if a UPC is present its QOH = 1 and if it's absent its QOH = 0.
You can also provide us with:
- Retailer's selling price: This feature will be supported soon in select parts of our platform. If no price is provided, the brand-provided MSRP will be displayed.
- Compare-at price: This feature will be supported soon in select parts of our platform. If no price is provided, the selling price will be the only price displayed on those parts of the platform.
- Store ID: for multi-store retailers. Store ID can be any alphanumeric ID and can include spaces. If you prefer, you can also send a single file per store. During setup, please let us know which ID or file name matches which location.
How should the report be formatted?
- Each part of the report must be in a single column. Ideally, UPC/EAN are in column A, quantity on hand is in column B, etc. However, we can add an adapter to look in specific columns if need be.
- The name of the file must stay the same each day. Please do not include date or timestamps in the file name.
- We can accept .txt, .csv, .xls, .xlsx, or an extensionless flat file.
- Headers are optional. If there is unskippable header information (such as data about the date the report was run, et c.), please let us know during setup and we will set up our system to skip those rows.
- Completely blank rows are treated as the end of the file.
- UPC/EANs with a quantity of 0 may be included.
- UPC/EANs from unsupported brands may be included. Our system will simply skip any UPC/EANs that it doesn't recognize.
How should we transmit the report to Locally?
There are several options:
- SFTP: Retailers can generate SFTP credentials in their Locally account. You can have retailers generate credentials as part of their inventory feed setup, or contact us if you'd like to use one set of credentials for all of your retailers who want to share their inventory via Locally. Prefer to post your file(s) to your own SFTP server, or already have a location where a compatible file already exists? Provide Locally with access and we can pull your file(s) from this location.
- Email: Every store location in our system has a unique email address assigned that inventory files can be sent to. The retailer can access those addresses after they've claimed their account.
- Dropbox: Create a Dropbox folder and name it "Locally." Share the folder with dropbox@locally.com and then notify us at retailers@locally.com. Drop your file(s) in the folder. Locally will link our system to scan this folder several times per day and absorb any changes.
- URL: We can pick up a file at a URL. Note that we can also do this with, for example, a Google Product Feed. If Quantity On Hand isn't available in this feed, our system would treat a UPC's presence as QOH=1 and its absence as QOH=0. Note that we cannot work with .xml files at this time.
- API: If you'd like to work with us to set up an API connection, please contact POS@locally.com to discuss.
How frequently should the report run?
The inventory report needs to be sent to us daily, at minimum. If you're sending retailers' feeds to us via SFTP, email, Dropbox, or URL, we scan for changes to those files as often as every hour. API connections can update in near-real time.
In order to be promoted as a Premier Connection, the report must be automated.