Best practice to connect Magento 2 to price/product service

Question

I have my own price/product service that I need to connect to Magento. The service has a variable amount of products with very variable prices. The price can change with every request a customer makes. So it needs to be fetched every time a customer requests the page at least. But probably even in between, informing him/her of an updated price.

What is the best practice to do this in Magento 2? Do I completely drag out the price part of Magento to my API? Do I overwrite prices in the Magento database with my API? Do I fetch prices on the fly with the API or do I overwrite them after Magento sets the prices? Or ...?

At most I want to prevent being forced to maintain products and prices in two places (Magento, my database).

Thanks for any information, read-ups, books about the topic!

Answer 1

This is just a part of a part of an idea.
For the product view pages and the cart you can simply retrieve the prices from your external source using the vent catalog_product_get_final_price.
But if you have a lot of products you might get into performance problems.

But this approach won't work for listing products.
The product prices are indexed in catalog_product_index_price.
If you have a lot of discount rules and a lot of tier prices I have no idea how you can achieve this, but if you have just simple prices, you can try to rewrite the method \Magento\Catalog\Model\ResourceModel\Product::_productLimitationPrice and retrieve your prices from the third party for the current collection.

but again, if you have a lot of products, this will end up in performance issues.

Answer 2

I would highly recommend a cron based or periodical price fetching of prices from custom table instead of pulling the prices from api, as there would some cases where you may fail to fetch prices like connectivity issues.This would also be reliable and will not have performance issues.It should be something like magento updates currency values.

There are other cases to consider to draw a complete solution like

1) what is the frequency of the price changes

2) Are the products only simples

3) Do you have other promotions,tier prices etc.

Well thats just an idea to start with

Answer 3

If the prices are essentially 'live' then a realistic option may be to remove prices from the catalog listings (category pages, search results etc) and only show them on the product pages. Here they could be pulled asynchronously using Javascript and applied to the basket directly if a customer wishes to buy. This would then 'lock in' that price, if this is the desired behavior?

In addition, a server-side technology such as Node.js could be used to achieve real-time price updates on the product pages. Of course, there's nothing to stop this same approach being rolled out to the catalog pages too, but this would involve significantly more complex development.

Without understanding the whole problem I can't be more specific, but hopefully this at least gives you some ideas.

Answer 4

What about:

Use fast api to show product on frontend (direct frontend). Because customer change price regularly if save price in table catalog_product you will meet problem about performance. Use it directly on frontend.

When a finally price confirmed. save price for that product. So other part will follow original Magento process.