Scenario – High volume/availability of e-Commerce pricing
In this scenario, the customer is interested in high-volume/availability of e-Commerce pricing. You’ll need to know the following information about the customer so that you can meet their requirements:
- External e-Commerce framework
- Millions of customers
- Over one hundred thousand products
- Complex pricing / trade agreements are in place:
- Variant 1: Product and price are stored in finance and operations aps.
- Variant 2: Pricing is managed in an external pricing service, and products are stored in finance and operations apps.
- The supply chain is managed in finance and operations apps, including planning and warehouse management systems
Patterns
A good pattern (best practice) to follow would be to cache price and discount data in a middle tier outside of finance and operations apps:
- Variant 1: Middleware > Example: Dynamics 365 Commerce Cloud scale unit (RCSU)
- Variant 2: Middleware > Example: external pricing service
Further information
This problem is difficult because your usage pattern can vary significatively in terms of frequency and volume. As a result, you’ll need to:
- Avoid overloading the enterprise resource planning (ERP) with item price OData queries. These queries could get throttled as well (HTTP 429).
- Consider that under-loaded, blocking price lookups would make the e-commerce site seem slow.
- Duplicate the pricing logic or cache all permutations. This approach might be impractical if it’s overly complex.
- Consider a near real-time pattern that doesn’t block the UI (no OData) if pricing is too complex or volatile.
- Consider that tight coupling=>no ERP means no e-commerce. Try to avoid a high degree of coupling between ERP and e-commerce systems.