Promotional Price Adjustment System Offline Mapping
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Solution Overview
Problem
Online shopping platforms face inefficiencies in determining and applying promotional discounts, leading to increased computing costs and user frustration due to slow processing times, which can result in lost sales.
Innovation Solution
A method and system that generate a mapping between products and promotions, allowing for offline determination of candidate promotions based on item-specific conditions, reducing computational operations during checkout by evaluating only candidate promotions against the virtual shopping cart, and utilizing caching to improve system performance.
Engineering Contradictions & Design Principles
Engineering Contradiction Analysis
1Measurement precision
If real-time promotion evaluation is performed for all products and promotions during checkout, then accurate discount application is achieved, but processing time increases significantly
Solution Approach 1:
The system pre-generates a mapping between products and their candidate promotions during an offline process, storing this mapping in a data structure accessible during checkout. This preliminary action eliminates the need for real-time evaluation of all promotions against all products, reducing checkout processing time while maintaining discount accuracy by evaluating only pre-identified candidate promotions.
2Reliability
If comprehensive promotion evaluation is performed for all products in the catalog, then all eligible discounts are identified, but computing resources are excessively consumed
Solution Approach 1:
The system extracts only the relevant subset of promotions (candidate promotions) that are applicable to each product based on pre-defined criteria such as product category, brand, or attributes. This extraction occurs during an offline mapping generation process, creating a streamlined data structure that contains only product-promotion pairs that meet eligibility criteria, thereby reducing computing resource consumption during checkout while maintaining complete eligibility accuracy.
3Reliability
If promotion data is retrieved from servers during each checkout operation, then real-time promotion availability is ensured, but network latency increases wait time
Solution Approach 1:
The system pre-loads and caches the product-promotion mapping data structure during an offline process or during low-traffic periods, storing it in a readily accessible format (such as a hash map or database index). During checkout operations, the system retrieves this pre-computed mapping locally without requiring real-time server queries, thereby eliminating network latency while ensuring data accuracy through periodic updates of the cached information.
Data Source
AI summary
A promotion price adjustment system of the present application utilizes improved data definitions, caching, and a combination of online and offline processing to increase the efficiency and speed of applying promotional discounts in electronic retail systems. The system performs an offline batch process on a product catalog to generate a predetermined mapping between products in the catalog and candidate promotions. When checkout of a product in a virtual shopping cart is initiated, the product's candidate promotions are obtained from the predetermined mapping. Each of those candidate promotions is then evaluated against the properties of the virtual shopping cart to determine which of those candidate promotions are eligible for application. Any eligible promotions may serve as a basis for applying price discounts to the virtual shopping cart.