How interest allocation works

This page explains what happens to an interest after you record it. It shows how Lychee connects arriving stock to the customers who want it, and how an interest moves through to a sale. This page gives background, not instructions. For the tasks themselves, see How to record an interest (sales associates) and Configure the interest list (administrators).

The parts involved

An interest sits on top of a small chain of moving parts. Lychee keeps this chain for each product:

• The interest list: the record of the customers who want a given product.
• Replenishment: when stock of that product comes in, someone records how many pieces arrived.
• Inventory: each arriving piece becomes a unit that you can set aside for a customer.
• Allocation: Lychee reserves one of those pieces for one interested customer.

When stock arrives

Auto-allocate is a setting on each product (see Configure the interest list). When a product has auto-allocate turned on and someone replenishes its stock, Lychee takes the pieces that just arrived. Lychee offers them to customers who have a recorded interest, one piece per customer. Lychee continues until no pieces or no interests remain.

Your store sets the order that Lychee uses. Lychee does not fix this order. Lychee uses one of these two orders:

• the position in which your team arranged the interests
• the order in which your team recorded the interests

Your store controls allocation. Allocation is not an automatic, guaranteed first-come entitlement. You can also handle any piece manually.

When Lychee reserves a piece for a customer, the customer’s interest moves from Received to Allocated. Lychee holds that specific piece for the customer.

The window to act

An allocation is not the end of the process. It is a prompt to act. A held piece is not available to other customers, so an allocated interest does not wait indefinitely. Your store sets an auto-cancel window (48 hours by default). If no one confirms with the customer before the window ends, Lychee cancels the interest automatically. Lychee then releases the piece and offers it to another interested customer.

For this reason, it is important to act on an allocation quickly. For the same reason, Lychee can create a task for the sales associate at the moment that it allocates an interest (see Automate tasks). The task and the window are two parts of the same idea. A held piece is a temporary reservation, and someone must act on it.

The lifecycle

An interest moves through a small number of states:

• Received: you recorded the interest, and Lychee holds no piece yet.
• Allocated: Lychee holds a piece for the customer, and the auto-cancel clock runs.
• Accepted: the sales associate confirmed that the customer still wants the piece.
• Fulfilled: the piece went to the customer. The reservation is complete.

An interest can also go to one of two side branches:

• Postponed or Canceled: Lychee releases the held piece, and the piece becomes available again. Lychee offers it to another interested customer. You can renew a postponed interest later, which returns it to Received.

Thus, a piece never stays stuck. If the customer that Lychee holds a piece for does not take it in time, the piece goes to another customer who wants it.