ShelfBridge: Hyperlocal Inventory Recovery

Independent electronics retailers often lose a sale when a customer requests a product that is out of stock, even though another nearby store may have it available. ShelfBridge explores a shared neighbourhood inventory network that helps a shop capture unmet demand, compare nearby stock, screen candidate products using SKU, barcode, and basic electrical attributes, request supplier confirmation, and coordinate a reservation-to-handover workflow. The interactive prototype brings this process together in a React dashboard featuring request capture, multi-store inventory management, product-match inspection, supplier coordination, reservation countdowns, store onboarding, demand insights, CSV export, and a unit-economics calculator. Its matching logic prioritises exact product identifiers and includes basic safeguards intended to flag incompatible products, such as chargers that do not meet the requested wattage. The financial simulator illustrates how customer sale value, supplier transfer price, delivery costs, and platform fees affect retailer contribution. The current public repository is a hackathon proof of concept built around synthetic stores, sample catalogue records, and illustrative transactions. Core transaction actions, request-parser presets, and the concurrency demonstration currently operate through frontend state; live merchant/POS integrations, server-side persistence and locking, and real AI inference are not connected in the published branch. ShelfBridge aims to help independent retailers serve more customers, improve the use of available local inventory, and turn an otherwise lost sale into a coordinated neighbourhood transaction. Future development will focus on a reliable backend, transaction-safe reservations, stronger product compatibility validation, and integration with real inventory systems.