Objective: keep prices and stock consistent across ERPs, supplier feeds, and shops despite delays, rate limits, and concurrent updates.
1) Latency budgets
- Targets by signal: stock < 60s, price < 5m, promotions immediate; pick SLAs per business impact.
- Prioritization: hot SKUs and low-stock items jump the queue; batch cold updates.
2) Currency & VAT
- FX normalization: store base currency + timestamp; reprice on significant FX drift (e.g., >0.5%).
- VAT policy: compute gross/net consistently; cache rules per market.
- Rounding: bank/marketing rounding rules applied after VAT.
3) Inventory freshness
- Safety stock buffers: publish available - buffer to reduce oversell during sync windows.
- Backorder semantics: explicit flags; never infer backorder from negative stock.
4) Conflict resolution
- Last-write wins for cosmetic fields; source-of-truth for price/stock.
- Versioned updates: include version/ETag to detect lost updates; reject on mismatch and retry with fresh data.
5) Promotions
- Effective windows: start/end timestamps in UTC; guardrails to prevent stale promos.
- Precedence: base price → markdown → coupon; never double-discount.
6) Monitoring
- Drift metrics: percent of SKUs where shop price/stock ≠ ERP; alert above threshold.
- Retry depth & rate limits: watch 429/5xx; backoff+jitter and per-destination quotas.
Outcome
With explicit latency budgets and deterministic rules, teams avoid oversell, mispriced items, and end up with predictable, auditable sync.
What's next
Next up: Channel-Specific Pricing — price lists, MAP/MSRP rules, and marketplace quirks.