Never seen this before! How does it work??

8 replies
Hi all

I was looking at Farfetch and they've managed to do something that I had never seen before: a cart that is filled with items that are in other shops.
They work with 100s of retailers, they don't hold any inventory and the items are drop shipped from the various shops. Yet they have managed to make a cart that allows you to shop from all these shops without leaving the Farfetch site.
How Does That Work??

If someone knows that please tell me
#work
  • Profile picture of the author SkepticalHippo
    There are two ways that I see this working:

    1. The retailers allow some sort of database access or provide with exported product lists from their stores.

    2. There are crawlers built that crawl the other stores for products and then add them to the database on that site.
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  • Profile picture of the author Adrianhenry
    The above answer is along the right lines I would guess. One of those is probably the way that the site is populated with products.

    The cart itself will then be populated with products from the farfetch site (that have been put there by the crawler). At this point I shouldnt think the actual site with the inventory will know anything about it. Once the transaction is put through on the farfetch site they will then have software that will automatically place the orders on all the respective sites using their own account details but the shoppers shipping details.
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  • Profile picture of the author altar22
    I've done a little research and Farfetch's has a kind of virtual inventory that is populated (either by partner shops, or their own staff I don't know), so it's not what I thought it was.
    @ Andrianhenry yes that what Keep.com is doing now apparently, but it's unsustainable and they'll have to find a way to automate.
    However I've found that other companies like Keep.com's OneCart, Cosmic Cart and Shoppable have come out with what they call "universal carts", which is what I was thinking.

    While a truly universal cart seems really tough to implement, I'm wondering how hard it would be to have your cart sync with inventories of partner sites? I suppose you would have to create a plugin (for all major carts) that each partner site would have to install in order to sync with you?
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  • Profile picture of the author Adrianhenry
    The easiest way to do it if a company was in partnership with another site where the site would have a cart for the original company would be if the company built an API to interface with the cart. By doing this the site could easily just implement a cart with the API which would provide direct access to the original companies database and inventory.
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    • Profile picture of the author altar22
      Yes some carts have sync features for users who have different shops sharing the same inventory.
      I suppose you could use that for what I'd like to do.
      I guess what I'm looking to implement is an affiliation system with no redirect (sale completed without leaving the site)
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      • It sounds like you might be looking for inventory software that automatically communicates with your dropshipper? I do work for a software that automates the data transfers between you and your suppliers, so that a shopper can purchase something from your website and a purchase order will automatically be sent to the supplier. Shoppers never leave your site, and are unaware that a dropshipper is involved. You may want to take a look at ecommerce software review sites like EcomBytes and WebRetailer to find a good list of tools that can accomplish this for you. Both sites also post reviews, so you can skim around and see what your peers think of various tools.

        Good luck!
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        • Profile picture of the author altar22
          Originally Posted by tiana with ecomdash View Post

          It sounds like you might be looking for inventory software that automatically communicates with your dropshipper? I do work for a software that automates the data transfers between you and your suppliers, so that a shopper can purchase something from your website and a purchase order will automatically be sent to the supplier. Shoppers never leave your site, and are unaware that a dropshipper is involved. You may want to take a look at ecommerce software review sites like EcomBytes and WebRetailer to find a good list of tools that can accomplish this for you. Both sites also post reviews, so you can skim around and see what your peers think of various tools.

          Good luck!
          Yes that's right, an inventory syncing tool.
          Thanks for the websites, I'll check them out
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  • Profile picture of the author earningrobot
    Check this one, it really works.

    China Millionaire
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