06 / Integration Architecture & Constraint Analysis
Designing a Scheduled Price Launch
A costed design for changing varied sale prices across roughly 80,000 SKUs at a fixed time.
The problem
A retailer needs varied sale prices across a catalogue of roughly 80,000 SKUs to become visible at a fixed time. Applying every change at the deadline through the standard connector would put a large read-and-write workload on the storefront API.
My contribution
I investigated the connector’s behaviour and the API cost and throttling constraints, then challenged the obvious plan to push all changes through the usual sync path. I worked with product and integration stakeholders to shape and cost an alternative.
The approach
The proposed design stages prices in the PIM ahead of the event. At cutover, a scheduled integration job reads the prepared values and writes the required price fields directly through the storefront API. That avoids the connector’s broader read-before-write path for this specific operation and allows discounts to differ by SKU.
The result
This is a costed design for a prospective customer, not a completed launch. Its value as a case study is the investigation and decision: establish the workload and platform constraints before committing a revenue-critical event to an integration path.