Your marketing team is planning campaigns around stock they do not know is low and your buying team is sitting on margin-rich inventory that marketing does not know exists.
The inventory-marketing disconnect is one of the most consistently expensive structural failures in ecommerce operations and one of the least likely to appear in either team's reporting because neither team is accountable for the gap between them.
Marketing plans to a calendar set three months out. Inventory moves daily. The promotional period that was planned around a hero product that is now at critical stock levels drives acquisition spend to a product page that will disappoint the customer who arrives expecting availability. The margin-rich product in the warehouse with strong availability and no promotional support sits undiscovered behind a search algorithm that is boosting the stockout.
In a matrix environment, this gap has a name. It is called planning misalignment and it is treated as a coordination problem. It is not a coordination problem. It is a commercial system design problem. The two functions are optimising for different things on different timescales and the customer experiences the collision between them at the moment of highest purchase intent.
Connect the inventory signal to the media signal in real time or keep paying to acquire customers you cannot fulfil.
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