Shop a specific physical store's inventory online
Problem
When an item shows 'sold out' online it is often still on the shelf at a nearby physical store, but retailer apps cannot browse or reserve by that specific store's stock — so shoppers lose the purchase entirely (recurring with Belk, Ulta and others).
Opportunity
A layer over retailers' store-locator and stock APIs that lets users browse and reserve a specific store's live inventory, with in-store pickup or personal-shopper requests.
Market analysis
Third-party store inventory checkers exist and are popular for big chains — BrickSeek and PopFindr query Target and Walmart store-level stock — but they only cover large retailers with leaky inventory APIs, and none can complete a transaction. The idea dies at the long tail: Belk, Ulta and most mid-size chains expose no per-store stock API, and reservation requires the retailer's own OMS, which no outsider can write to.
Market · Deal hunters and omnichannel shoppers; demand is proven for the big-chain inventory-checker subset (BrickSeek's audience), not for per-store reservations at mid-size retailers.
Pricing · Comparables run free/ad-supported (PopFindr, BrickSeek free checkers) or premium $3-10/month alert tiers; affiliate commissions are the realistic monetization.
Pros
- + Proven demand for the read-only subset — BrickSeek and PopFindr have real audiences.
- + Clear SEO wedge: 'does [store] have [item] in stock near me' queries are common.
Cons
- − The valuable action — reserving a specific store's item — requires retailer cooperation that does not exist.
- − Mid-size chains (Belk, Ulta) have no public per-store inventory APIs; scraping violates this pipeline's no-bot constraint.
- − Retailers keep breaking third-party checkers as soon as they get popular.
- − The genuine fix is the retailer's own buy-online-pickup-in-store flow — solving it is their job, not an outsider's.
Existing / similar tools
Source
r/Doesthisexist (Reddit)
Worth being blunt: the reservation half of this idea is structurally impossible without the retailer, because writing to their order management system is not something a third-party layer can do — so the buildable remainder is yet another inventory checker, a category BrickSeek already owns for the only chains whose stock data leaks. The honest diagnosis of the Reddit complaint is that retailers’ own BOPIS flows are buggy and store-blind, and only the retailer can fix that. If anything is salvageable, it is an alerting service on the big chains (“ping me when this UPC appears at my store”) layered on existing checkers — but that is a hobby scraper with a newsletter, not a product, and it sits on data access that can be revoked at any moment.