Sold out?

This is really NOT how eCommerce should work: You are ordering on a wednesday evening, you are hoping that your goods will be delivered on friday or latest by saturday, and then you are receiving an email on tuesday (!!) that they are sold out.

This is what happened at the german shoe retailer GOERTZ, as you can see on their email here:

There are two topics within this case:

1. You should not treat your customer as an idiot. You should not excuse yourself by telling your customer that there are rare cases where products get "suddenly" sold out, if you are sending your article-is-sold-out message nearly a week after you have received the order.
   
2. You should integrate your backend IT better to your shop infrastructure. You always compete with Amazon regarding service and response time and Amazon is damned good at that.

I think retailers have to learn that in eCommerce your online shop is what your physical store is in stationary retail. If you are not investing into your stores to make the customer experience as good as possible you will loose. 

Btw. that is what lately happend to Schlecker here in germany. They missed to keep up with their competitors, lost more and more customers and in the end failed.

And how does this whole case relate to master data management? 

Actually "stock on hand" typically is not considered to be master data. This shows that introducing master data management also implies to look into your IT infrastructure how you are doing integration for your IT systems.

And the requirement for an online shop is typically a "near real time integration". This means changes from all sources for the online shop have to be propagated to the shop nearly in real time. Batch jobs which run once a day are not acceptable!

And your master data system should be one source for your online shop.