Auto parts price feeds: 5 common mistakes
The same five mistakes show up in price feed integration, shop after shop: currency conversion quietly eating the margin, missing caches, stock numbers the warehouse stopped agreeing with hours ago. Here is each one, and how we avoid them.
Currency conversion calculated wrong
Most European suppliers publish prices in EUR. If the shop sells in RON, GBP, or HUF, conversion has to be correct, refreshed daily, and buffered against fluctuations.
The classic mistake: national bank rate on day X, applied to prices for the following 2 weeks. When EUR moves 2%, margin disappears. Solution: daily rate with a 1-2% buffer and catalog recalculation on cron.
For fixed safety margins, document the business rule explicitly. Do not hide it in a config file without context.
No margin protection
The supplier changes the price by plus or minus 30% overnight. Without validation rules, your catalog auto-publishes the new price, and a customer can buy below cost.
Simple rule: any price change above X% (usually 15-20%) is flagged for manual review before publishing. The alert reaches the operations team, not a lost email in an inbox.
For volatile categories (some auto parts, electronics), set wider buffers. For stable products (oils, filters), tighter ones.
No aggressive caching
Every query to the supplier API or to TecCom costs time and, sometimes, money. If the shop queries for every visitor, you load the catalog slowly and pay 100 times for the same data.
Two-level caching: Redis for near-instant responses (TTL 30-300 seconds), Postgres for daily persisted snapshots (TTL 24 hours with background refresh).
Cache invalidation on order placement is critical. Otherwise a customer can see stock as available when it just sold out.
Ignoring stock volatility
Price feeds usually include stock. But stock changes between the moment the feed was generated and the moment the shop uses it. On average, 5-15 minutes of lag.
Display this uncertainty transparently: "Available at supplier" (not "In stock with us"), or query stock in real time via TecCom when the customer lands on the product page.
At checkout, re-verifying availability is mandatory. If stock disappeared between view and placement, cancel the order with a clear notification, do not leave it hanging.
No fallback for feed outages
The supplier feed goes down. Either their server, the network, or a parsing bug. Your shop must keep working, not serve 500s on that supplier's products.
Strategy: keep the last valid feed in a snapshot, and show prices with a "updated X hours ago" marker. Customer knows data may not be fresh, but the order can proceed with re-verification at placement.
Monitor feed age per supplier. If older than 24-48 hours, escalate to the tech team. Do not let the shop sell at last-week prices.
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