Buy online, pick up in store (BOPIS)

Enable store-level availability filtering and pick up in-store experiences with Algolia for Salesforce B2C Commerce.

Buy online, pick up in-store (BOPIS) lets shoppers reserve or pay for an item online and collect it from a physical store. This guide shows you how to index store-level stock information and add an In stock at store facet to your storefront.

BOPIS indexing:

• Adds a storeAvailability attribute that contains the IDs of stores where a variant is available.
• Sends this attribute with every product (variant or product level, depending on your record model).

It only indicates if the product is available in the store, not the number of available products.

Before you begin

This feature requires:

• Algolia Search & Discovery cartridge 25.3.0 or later
• Salesforce’s plugin_instorepickup cartridge

Some controllers in plugin_instorepickup fully replace SFRA endpoints instead of extending them. Place the plugin_instorepickup cartridge before app_storefront_base and after the Algolia cartridges. This order ensures that Algolia extensions to these endpoints aren’t overridden (for example, Cart-AddProduct).

The plugin_instorepickup cartridge relies on features from B2C Compatibility Mode 21.2, such as Number.isNaN(). If you use compatibility mode 19.10 or 18.10 (the minimum supported by the Algolia cartridge), you may encounter errors. To resolve these errors, update to compatibility mode 21.2 or later, or adjust the plugin_instorepickup cartridge.

If you enable real-time inventory updates, the storeAvailability attribute is updated with the latest inventory level after an order is placed.

Enable store-inventory indexing

1. Go to Merchant Tools > Algolia > Algolia in the Business Manager.
2. In Additional Product Attributes, append storeAvailability and click Apply. Indexing jobs will now recognize this attribute.

During indexing, the cartridge:

• Retrieves each variant’s available‑to‑sell (ATS) value per store.
• Adds the store’s ID to storeAvailability if the ATS is ≥ In Stock Threshold (defined in your custom preferences).

JSON

// Variant‑level example
{
  "objectID": "25523741-blue-xs",
  "name": "Essential Tee",
  "storeAvailability": ["paris_store", "berlin_store"]
}

Attribute location:

Record model	Location of storeAvailability
Base product	Inside every item in the variants array
Variant product	At the root level of the record

Understand the size impact

If you run hundreds of stores, storeAvailability can add several kilobytes per record. To limit the impact:

• Use short store IDs or a custom mapping that translates an abbreviated ID to a friendly name on the frontend.
• Use post processing to filter out stores that aren’t relevant to your business.

Add an In stock at store facet

After the attribute exists in your index, create a facet:

1. Open your products index in the Algolia dashboard.
2. Go to Configuration > Facets and add storeAvailability as a attributesForFaceting.
3. Save the settings.

How the storefront resolves the “Store” facet

1. The SFRA Search controller passes a JSON array of store details to searchResultsNoDecorator.isml as pdict.storeList.
2. The storeAvailability field in each product record includes a storeIds array that lists the stores carrying the item.
3. When the store facet renders, every store ID is looked up in pdict.storeList. The frontend displays store names in place of the IDs.