Alerts for Stock-Out Burst.
At a glance
A real-time alert that fires when an unusual cluster of SKUs drops to zero available-to-sell inside a single hour on your Salesforce Commerce Cloud (SFCC, formerly Demandware) realm. One product selling out is normal trading. A burst, many SKUs hitting zero at once, is almost never demand; it is a feed, allocation, or sync event, and it can quietly remove a whole category from sale across every site that shares the inventory list. Because SFCC inventory lists are frequently shared across sites, a single burst can hit US, UK, and DE storefronts simultaneously.
| What it counts | The number of SKUs whose inventory record transitioned to available-to-sell = 0 within the alert window. It watches the rate of zero-transitions, not the standing count of out-of-stock items (that is the Out-of-Stock Products card). |
| Why it matters | A sudden cluster of zero-transitions is a leading indicator of a systemic problem: a broken inventory feed, an allocation/reservation bug, an ERP or OMS sync failure, or an inventory-list misconfiguration. Caught in the hour, it is a quick fix; caught the next morning, it is a day of lost sales across every site on the shared list. |
| Reading the value | Treat any fire as “investigate now”. The figure is the count of SKUs that went to zero in the window. A small steady trickle of genuine sell-throughs will not trip it; a spike will. The signal is the burst, the rate, not the absolute OOS level. |
| What it is not | It is not the total out-of-stock count and not a low-stock warning. It is specifically about the velocity of SKUs crossing into zero available-to-sell. A high standing OOS count with no recent transitions will not fire this card. |
| Inventory scope | SFCC tracks availability per inventory list (inventory record / available-to-sell), and a list is often shared across multiple sites. A burst on a shared list affects every bound site at once, which is exactly why it is a hero alert. |
| Unit | number (count of SKUs that hit zero in the window) |
| Time window | RT (rolling 1-hour burst detection) |
| Alert trigger | >5 SKUs transitioned to inventory available-to-sell = 0 in last 1h |
| Sentiment key | scc_alert_stock_out_burst |
| Roles | owner, operations |
Calculation
Calculated automatically from your Salesforce Commerce Cloud data. See the At a glance summary above for what the metric tracks and the worked example below for a typical reading.Worked example
A retailer runs a single SFCC B2C realm with US, UK, and DE DTC sites all bound to one shared inventory list fed nightly from an ERP. At 02:40 on 12 Jun 26 the alert fires. The hour’s zero-transitions:| Time (UTC) | SKUs to available-to-sell = 0 | Pattern |
|---|---|---|
| 02:10 - 02:20 | 2 | Genuine sell-through on two hero SKUs |
| 02:20 - 02:30 | 14 | Same product family, all sizes, one colourway |
| 02:30 - 02:40 | 23 | Adjacent families in the same feed batch |
| Total in window | 39 | Burst, well above the >5 threshold |
- Two of the 39 are real; the other 37 are a feed event. The first two zero-transitions are normal trading. The cluster of 37 across whole product families in minutes is the signature of a broken or partial ERP feed, not demand. The shape (entire families, contiguous batch) is the tell. Do not treat the burst as a sell-out.
- One list, three sites, one fire. Because US, UK, and DE share the inventory list, all three storefronts lost those SKUs at 02:40 simultaneously. A per-site view would show the same products dark everywhere. This is why the card is realm-level and hero: the blast radius is the whole estate.
- The alert bought you the night. Firing at 02:40 means an on-call operator can roll back or re-run the feed before the working day, instead of discovering 39 dead SKUs from a customer complaint at 09:00. Pair the fire with Out-of-Stock Products to confirm how many are still dark after remediation.
- Revenue exposure is immediate. Those 39 SKUs were selling until 02:40; every hour they stay at zero is lost revenue across three sites. The exposure flows into Revenue at Risk (live), which is the right place to size the dollar cost while you fix the feed.
Sibling cards merchants should reference together
| Card | Why pair it with Stock-Out Burst |
|---|---|
| Out-of-Stock Products | The standing count. Stock-Out Burst is the rate of new zeros; Out-of-Stock Products is how many are dark right now. Read both: the burst tells you something broke, the count tells you the current damage. |
| Low-Stock Products | The early-warning layer. SKUs flagged low are the ones most likely to feed the next burst; a list shrinking fast is a precursor. |
| Revenue at Risk (live) | Sizes the dollar exposure of the burst across sites while you remediate, turning a SKU count into a revenue figure. |
| SCC Inventory vs Marketplace Listings | A burst can leave SKUs dark on SFCC but still advertised on a marketplace; this cross-channel card catches that mismatch. |
| Order Processing Backlog | The same feed/sync failure that drives a burst often shows up here too; correlated fires point at a shared root cause. |
| Active Sites / Storefronts | Confirms the burst is an inventory event and not a site outage; if sites are healthy but SKUs are dark, the problem is the feed. |
Reconciling against Salesforce Commerce Cloud
Where to look in Business Manager: There is no single Business Manager report that equals this card, because SFCC shows you standing inventory state, not the rate of zero-transitions over the last hour. To verify a fire:- Confirm the dead SKUs: Merchant Tools, Products and Catalogs, Inventory, open the relevant inventory list and check the allocation / available-to-sell for the flagged SKUs. They should read zero (or stock-out) if the burst is real.
- Check the inventory list binding: Administration, Sites, Manage Sites, and the inventory configuration, to see which sites share the list and therefore which storefronts are affected.
- Trace the feed: SFCC inventory updates usually arrive via an import job or a LINK cartridge from the ERP/OMS. Administration, Operations, Jobs (or the import history) shows the last inventory import and whether it succeeded, partial-failed, or wiped quantities.
- Spot-check the storefront: load a flagged product page on each bound site to confirm it shows out of stock.
| Reason | Direction of divergence |
|---|---|
| Rate vs state. This card counts transitions in an hour; Business Manager shows the standing OOS list. They measure different things and will not match one-for-one. | Not directly comparable |
| Refresh timing. Available-to-sell changes appear in the API near-real-time; the data warehouse and some BM views lag a few minutes. | Vortex IQ fires slightly ahead of warehouse views |
| Shared-list scope. The burst is detected at the inventory-list level; a per-site BM check shows the same SKUs dark on every bound site, which can look like multiple separate problems. | One event appears across several sites in BM |
| Genuine sell-throughs in the window. A few real sell-outs can be part of the count; BM will not distinguish them from the feed-driven ones. | Small over-count of true demand |
| Re-stock during investigation. If a corrective feed runs while you check, BM may already show stock restored even though the alert fired. | BM higher than the moment of the fire |