Substitute and replacement products

A substitute is a product that is comparable and similar in functionality to the current item. A replacement is a product that supersedes the current item.

The concept of substitutes and replacements is widely used in different industries such as retail, automotive, and manufacturing. The terminology might change based on industry standard or business definitions. For example, in the automotive industry the term interchange is used for substitute parts, and supersession is used for replacement parts.

A substitute product can be used at point-of-sale to suggest alternates when an item is out of stock, and can also be used by the replenishment system for restocking inventory if the maximum order quantity of the main item is reached.

A replacement product is assigned when the current item becomes temporarily or permanently unavailable. When you receive any queries for the purchase or replenishment of the current item then the replacement product is selected when the current item is not available.

These examples are of an item-to-item relationships because the current product and the substitute and replacement products are all items. The data modeling concepts are similar to those for cross-sell and up-sell, where the main item has pointers to the related item (substitute or replacement).