Question:
Integration of Custom API for Synchronized Stock Management.
Product:
Wix Studio Velo API
What are you trying to achieve:
We are currently developing an e-commerce solution for a client using Wix’s platform. Our client operates both a direct offline store and multiple franchises. They are in the process of entering the e-commerce space and have selected Wix for its robust features and user-friendly interface.
We have a critical requirement for the seamless synchronization of stock counts between their offline and online stores. Specifically, when a customer places an order through the e-commerce store, we need to ensure that the stock count is updated simultaneously in both the online system and the offline store. Conversely, any stock changes occurring offline should be reflected in the online store in real-time.
Let’s say you have X application for managing offline store inventory. And now you will also use Wix to sell online and you want to connect your offline inventory data to Wix.
So if something change on Wix or in-store it’ll be updated in single place in this way you’ll see same stock quantity with minimal delay (delay would be max of few seconds or ms).
If there aren’t any apps that you would like to use in Wix app market then it means you have to code this with Wix’s APIs and/or SPIs.
Wix eCommerce Catalog SPI to sync catalog data from anywhere you want including your own custom collections or a third party API.
Wix eCommerce order approved event (API) can be helpful to only update data in offline catalog when something is changed in Wix.
Then you can expose a custom API for the Wix website and call that API when something changed in offline catalog.
You may also need to consider things like refunds etc.
You can search in Velo APIs to see which one is best for you, but in my opinion it’s better to have a single place to store the inventory data and use that single source for both offline and online catalog.
As far as I know if you use SPI to sync your products data you won’t directly see them in Wix Stores dashboard etc. These will be available in the backend system of Wix only. You can read docs for more info and examples.
Another way to handle this with Wix Stores is to again expose some APIs from your Wix site and call them from offline app and reverse when something updated at Wix. You can also use inventory related APIs:
Summary
There are many ways to handle this but it both depends what you have in your offline part and how you can sycn them together since you didn’t give any info about the offline party I don’t know what can be possible or not. Or what is better and worse.
Explose both Velo and Wix REST APIs/SPIs to find best option for your client.