What does an Allocator FTE own?
An Allocator FTE on ftes.ai owns the placement of stock across a store's locations, in the Merchandising department of the e-commerce org chart. It is judged on recovered sell-through and stockout days avoided, and accountable for proven sellers being in stock where they sell before they stock out. It exists because stores with two shops, a warehouse and a marketplace routinely have a best seller sold out in one place and ageing in another, and nobody's job is to notice.
It does not own the buy, which the Buyer FTE proposes, or the sale price, which the Pricing Officer FTE holds. It owns where the units the store already has should be.
Where do its numbers come from?
The Allocator FTE reads stock and sales by location from the store platform, the point of sale, the warehouse or 3PL feed and the marketplaces the store sells on; transfer costs and lead times between locations from the owner's Setup; forecast demand per location from the Demand Forecaster FTE; and the list of reserved locations and SKUs, stock a store is holding for a known reason, which it must not touch. Cover by size and location is computed from those, never assumed.
Where a location's stock record is degraded, the Data Trust FTE's state withholds the Allocator FTE's proposals for that location, because a transfer proposed from a wrong count is worse than none.
What does a transfer proposal contain?
Each proposal in the Approvals tab names the SKU and size, the source and destination, the units, the transfer cost, the days of cover at both locations before and after, the expected recovered sales over a stated window with its range, the low end recorded, and the stockout days it expects to avoid. A transfer between a store and online, or to an outlet or marketplace, shows the channel's sell-through for the SKU as the reason.
The owner, or the store manager for store locations, approves, edits the units or rejects with a note. Once a class of transfer, such as warehouse-to-warehouse rebalancing under a value, has a long clean record, it can be promoted to run without a gate; store transfers usually stay with the manager.
How are broken size runs repaired?
A broken size run is a product available in some sizes and not others at a location, which suppresses sales of the sizes still there. The common response is a reorder of the missing sizes, which takes a lead time and adds cash. The Allocator FTE first checks whether the network already holds the missing sizes with cover to spare and proposes moving them, which costs a transfer and takes days. Only when the network is short does it hand the gap to the Buyer FTE.
The proposal shows both paths, transfer and reorder, with their cost and timing, so the choice is the owner's with the arithmetic in front of them.
What does the Allocator FTE never do?
It never creates a transfer without approval at Level 0, never moves reserved stock, never decides which locations the store operates, and never proposes a transfer from a location whose stock record is degraded. It never counts a transfer as a result; the result is the sell-through recovered at the destination, measured after the stock arrived.
It also never proposes moving stock into a location the Store Officer FTE has flagged as over-stocked for that category, because the two roles read the same cover.
What does it report, and how honestly?
The Allocator FTE reports transfers proposed, approved and executed, recovered sell-through measured at the destination against the expected range, stockout days avoided where a stockout was imminent and the transfer arrived first, and broken size runs open and repaired. Recovered sell-through is a measured number from orders at the destination; the expected figure on the proposal is shown beside it so the owner can see the accuracy.
Where a transfer arrived and the SKU still did not sell, the report says so and the Demand Forecaster FTE's location forecast is recalibrated.
How does it work with the other roles, and in which tools?
The Allocator FTE reads the Demand Forecaster FTE, hands network shortages to the Buyer FTE, executes the store transfers the Store Officer FTE proposes, and routes the Cash Officer FTE's slow stock to the channel where it sells. It reads Shopify, WooCommerce or BigCommerce with Shopify POS, the warehouse or 3PL feed, Amazon Seller Central and NetSuite, and writes approved transfers where the store's inventory system expects them.
It earns its place from the second location onward. A single-warehouse, online-only store does not need it, and its Setup tab will say so.