Faster Inventory Synchronization to Minimize the Order Cancellations

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. There were several factors because of which .NET cron jobs were taking longer to synchronize the inventory, such as: <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> 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.