Ecommerce AI Coordination Playbook
Coordination practices for online retail teams running AI agent teams across inventory management, order fulfillment, pricing, marketplace operations, and customer experience. Built for the speed and complexity of multi-channel e-commerce.
Inventory
Dead Stock Detection
The inventory agent flags SKUs with zero sales in 60+ days, cross-referenced with current ad spend and page views. Dead stock with ad spend is an active money burn. Dead stock with page views is a conversion problem. Dead stock with neither is a candidate for liquidation or removal.
What goes wrong without this
200 SKUs sit in the warehouse for 6 months. Storage fees accumulate. Nobody runs the report because nobody owns dead stock detection. When someone finally looks, $15K in storage fees have eaten the margin on those products.
Dead Stock Detection and Liquidation Routing
The inventory agent flags SKUs with zero sales in 60+ days, cross-referenced with current ad spend, page views, and storage costs. Dead stock with ad spend is an active money burn. Dead stock with page views is a conversion problem. Dead stock with neither is a candidate for liquidation, bundling, or removal. The agent categorizes each dead SKU and routes to the appropriate agent for action.
What goes wrong without this
200 SKUs sit in the warehouse for 6 months. Storage fees accumulate at $0.75/unit/month. Nobody runs the report because nobody owns dead stock detection. When someone finally looks, $15K in storage fees have eaten the margin on those products entirely.
Low Stock Cascade Alert
When inventory for a SKU drops below the reorder threshold, the inventory agent triggers a cascade: notify the purchasing agent to reorder, tell the pricing agent to consider raising price or pausing ads, and tell the marketplace agent to reduce quantity buffers. One signal, three coordinated responses.
What goes wrong without this
A bestseller drops to 4 units. The ad agent keeps spending $200/day driving traffic. All 4 sell in an hour. The listing goes out of stock. The ad spend for the remaining 23 hours of the day drives traffic to a sold-out page. $180 wasted.
Pre-Order and Backorder Inventory Coordination
When a product is available for pre-order, the inventory agent tracks committed units separately from available units. The marketplace agent displays accurate availability dates. The fulfillment agent queues pre-orders for priority fulfillment when stock arrives. The customer communication agent sends shipping updates as the expected date approaches. Pre-order customers have the highest expectations and the lowest tolerance for silence.
What goes wrong without this
A product launches with 500 pre-orders. Stock arrives 2 weeks late. Nobody updates the pre-order customers. 200 of them contact support asking "where is my order?" The support queue is overwhelmed. 50 customers cancel. The product launch that should have been a win becomes a customer service crisis.
Single Source of Inventory Truth
One agent owns the inventory count. The website, marketplace listings, warehouse system, and POS all read from this agent's state. Never let two systems independently track the same SKU's quantity. The inventory agent reconciles all sources into one number.
What goes wrong without this
Shopify shows 5 units, Amazon shows 3, the warehouse has 2. A customer orders on Shopify. The inventory agent tries to fulfill but the warehouse is empty. The order is cancelled, the customer leaves a 1-star review, and the marketplace listing stays up selling phantom stock.
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