The stockroom is the store, and it is full of boxes.
Footwear keeps most of its stock out of sight, in boxes, in sizes, in a room a colleague has to walk to. Clarity reads the whole room in a pass, so the answer to "do you have it in a nine" stops being a trip.
One or two stores, thirty days, no hardware or software cost.
The sale is lost on the walk to the stockroom.
Nothing about footwear browsing works if the stockroom answer is slow or wrong. That one interaction carries more revenue per minute than anything else on the floor.
The long walk
A colleague leaves to check for a size, the shopper waits, and a third of the time the answer is no. Each trip costs a conversation that was going well.
Singles and pairs
Display shoes, single samples, and boxed pairs count differently. A system that only knows totals cannot tell you which one you have.
Deep size runs
More sizes per style than any other category, so a stock number at style level tells you almost nothing about sellability.
Boxed and unseen
Stock sealed in cardboard is invisible to the eye and to a camera. RFID reads through it, which is why footwear was an early adopter.
Answer the size question from the floor.
When a colleague can check every size in the building from the handheld in their hand, the conversation stays alive and the transfer or the order happens there and then.
The same platform, a different problem.
Item-level accuracy is the constant. What differs is where the stock hides and which number decides the sale.
Start with the stockroom.
Thirty days in one or two stores tells you what your real size availability is, which is usually the number that surprises people most.