<p>The client recently partnered with a Korean marketplace leader to penetrate the Korean market further and was using a third-party integration layer – ShopLinker – to connect with the partner’s marketplace. However, they were experiencing a high order cancellation rate due to delays in the daily inventory synchronization process. The primary reason behind the delay was that their .NET cron jobs were taking 5-8 hours to synchronize the IBM Sterling OMS (Order Management System) with ShopLinker.</p>
<p>There were several factors because of which .NET cron jobs were taking longer to synchronize the inventory, such as:</p>
<ul>
<li>Only one stock-keeping unit (SKU) was synchronized per API (Application Programming Interface) call to ShopLinker, resulting in total 90K API calls to synchronize all 90K SKUs.</li>
<li>There were permission-related issues with .NET cron jobs that were causing intermittent failure.</li>
</ul>
<p>As a result, there were inaccuracies in the inventory items of the partner’s marketplace, which was leading to a high order cancellation rate of 12-13%, impacting their business heavily. Besides, in some cases, the whole order was getting canceled due to partial fulfillment of items.</p>