Latency in Data Kills On-Shelf Availability

In today’s competitive grocery landscape, the shelf is where loyalty is won or lost. Yet despite decades of investment in inventory management systems, shoppers are still facing out-of-stocks.

And the cost is staggering.

Globally, grocery retailers lose $1.2 trillion in sales annually due to out-of-stocks.

For an industry already managing razor-thin margins, the cost of poor on-shelf availability is staggering. And it’s not just a supply chain issue—it’s a missed opportunity to serve your customers, protect your margins, and drive long-term loyalty.

The root cause?

Whilst the answer is multi-layered, one of the biggest, most overlooked culprits is data latency. That is, the time lag between what’s actually happening on your shelves — and when your teams become aware of it.

Inaccurate or delayed signals mean store teams are blind to real-time shelf conditions – leading to frustrated customers, disengaged employees, and lost revenue.

The bottom line, latency kills availability. And when availability drops, so do sales.

Why On-Shelf Availability Still Fails Issues Persist — Even With Perpetual Inventory Systems in Place

Grocery retailers have invested heavily in robust inventory management systems, ERP platforms, and forecasting tools.

Yet on-shelf availability issues persist. Why?

Because most inventory data is incomplete, inaccurate, or delayed.

Many of these systems were designed to manage stock movement across distribution centers and backrooms — not at the shelf level. They don’t provide real-time, shelf-level visibility. Instead, they rely on batch updates or manual inputs that can take hours, sometimes days, to surface critical availability issues.

Some retailers only do periodic audits or planogram compliance checks a handful of times a year.

The result? Store teams operate with a false sense of accuracy, unaware that shelves are empty until it’s too late. There’s a significant delay if issues are only discovered during audits or, worse, through customer complaints. This data latency creates gaps that systems don’t catch.

The Hidden Impact of Latency in Data — From Shelf to Sales

Data latency creates a domino effect across your business resulting in more than just on-shelf availability issues. Let’s break it down.

1. Lost Sales

When there’s a delay in identifying on-shelf availability issues, sales are lost in real-time. A shopper who can’t find what they came for won’t wait — they’ll leave.

And they might not come back. In fact, research has found that 66% of shoppers will switch stores if a product is unavailable. Each instance of an out-of-stock is a missed opportunity to drive revenue and repeat purchase.

ding real-time visibility and alerting ensures timely restocking and can significantly boost sales by preventing lost opportunities.

2. Eroded Customer Loyalty

Loyalty isn’t built on points programs — it’s built on trust. When customers can’t rely on your store to have what they need, they begin to look elsewhere.

According to Food Dive, more than 80% of consumers will choose a different brand or retailer if they experience out-of-stocks more than once. In today’s environment, that erosion happens fast.

Consistent on-shelf availability is key to winning – and keeping – your best customers.

3. Frustrated Store Teams

When store colleagues don’t have real-time visibility into on-shelf availability issues, they’re left in the dark. They often rely on outdated stock reports or time-consuming manual gap checks.

They spend time searching for phantom stock, second-guessing system data, or waiting for direction from central teams.

It’s inefficient, demotivating, and ultimately unsustainable. Research from Zebra found that 81% of store associates say they need better tools to improve accuracy and on-shelf availability.

Retailers who automate worklists and guide store teams to the highest-priority issues see a clear uplift in both execution and morale.

4. Operational Inefficiency

Delayed data means decisions are always made in hindsight. Instead of proactively maintaining on-shelf availability, retailers are left reacting to symptoms — and often with too little context to solve them effectively.

Data latency keeps you in a loop of firefighting instead of enabling strategic, data-driven action.

Retailers that get this right, though, are able to identify patterns of shelf non-compliance, act on root causes, and optimize their replenishment and merchandising.

What Causes Data Latency?

It should come as no surprise that retailers face an uphill task when it comes to faster access to accurate data. There are several common factors that contribute to data latency in the grocery retail environment, leading to on-shelf availability issues:

• Legacy systems that rely on batch processing, limited integrations, or manual inputs.
• Disconnected data sources between supply chain, inventory, merchandising, and store ops systems.
• Lack of real-time shelf-level data, leading to reliance on inaccurate audits and poor planogram compliance.
• Low stock accuracy due to infrequent updates — especially at the store and SKU level — meaning issues can sit for hours, or days, before being addressed.

These challenges create blind spots that forecasting alone can’t solve. On-shelf availability metrics might look fine on paper but often don’t reflect the reality customers experience in-store. 

Theft, omnichannel fulfillment, mis-scans, and damaged or wasted products all contribute to distorted views of on-shelf availability, and increased out-of-stocks.

In one major UK retailer, Asda, the sheer volume of SKUs across their stores and a lag in accurate inventory data resulted in our solutions identifying 1.6m units of stock not actually existing in their stores or warehouses. A substantial amount that their internal teams didn’t have visibility of, leading to estate-wide availability issues.

However, our solutions automatically identified these issues and alerted the teams, saving Asda millions in lost sales.

And, ultimately, this is what retailers are looking to solve.

A Modern Approach to On-Shelf Availability

To truly improve on-shelf availability, retailers need to shift from lagging indicators to leading actions. That means using technology that captures shelf conditions in near real-time, prioritizes what matters most, and empowers store teams to act faster.

Solutions like Retail Insight’s AvailabilityInsight platform do exactly that.

It helps leading grocers detect, prioritize, and resolve out-of-stocks before they impact sales. By integrating with existing systems and applying AI to detect patterns and on-shelf availability issues, AvailabilityInsight:

• Detects shelf gaps in real-time using predictive analytics
• Guides store teams with automated, prioritized worklists
• Improves replenishment efforts by using accurate inventory data
• Increases on-shelf availability and sales with always-on-time alerts
• Boosts customer satisfaction and retention
  
  

AvailabilityInsight seamlessly integrates with any existing systems and leverages foundational retail data to improve on-shelf availability and increase sales recovery. It works in real-time so you can provide the right alerts to your teams and the right products to your customers, at the right time.

The results are clear: addressing the root causes of poor product availability can improve sales recovery, enhance employee engagement, and strengthen shopper loyalty.

The Bottom Line: Data Latency Doesn't Need to Kill On-Shelf Availability

Data latency is one of the most critical—and fixable—barriers to retail success today. It’s not just a data issue; it’s also a sales issue, a customer experience issue, and an employee productivity issue.

Forward-thinking retailers are already taking action by investing in more responsive, shelf-aware tools that reduce delay and drive execution. If you want to protect your customers, empower your teams, and recover lost sales — it’s time to move faster than then your out-of-stocks.

Want to see how leading grocers are solving the on-shelf availability challenge? Explore how Retail Insight helps retailers close the availability gap.

Request a demo today.