Improved Event Handling for Elastic Path Commerce Cloud Integrations

As demand increases for brands to deliver seemingly effortless digital experiences, business and technology requirements get ever more complex. In an effort to keep up with these requirements, many brands look to leverage a best-of-breed approach where they compose, or integrate, multiple vendors into one cohesive solution.

This is why Elastic Path leverages a Headless Commerce architecture and a Composable Commerce approach to power products that are specifically designed to work in parallel with your internal and external systems. Our technology seamlessly supports eCommerce integrations that dynamically link resources and capabilities in real-time to produce responsive digital experiences that engage customers and drive revenue.

More specifically, brands can leverage our backend integration framework to connect Elastic Path Commerce Cloud with existing applications like enterprise resource planning (ERP), order management (OMS), fulfillment, and other systems, ensuring that buying is quick and easy for your shoppers. Integrations can be delivered through messaging - using Amazon SQS - to ensure that your systems are notified of events in your commerce application in a reliable, timely fashion.

For example, when a customer updates their address in Elastic Path, an event occurs that automatically updates your Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system with the change. Similarly, when an order status changes to paid, an Elastic Path event automatically reduces the affected stock in an inventory management system by the number of items in the order.

In this blog post, we will discuss a recent update to Elastic Path Commerce Cloud that makes integrations even more efficient.
 

What’s Changed?

Elastic Path is constantly looking for ways to make embracing a Composable Commerce approach easier and more performant. Previously, events were processed in the order they were created, but we knew there had to be a better way to optimize this.

Now, events are processed concurrently, reducing the time it takes to deliver events. An increase in the number of events is now automatically handled by Elastic Path Commerce Cloud, improving performance and scalability.

• No messages are lost
• You can view integration and event status

What to do Next?

If you are an existing Elastic Path Commerce Cloud customer, we want to ensure you get the value from this enhancement. What you do next depends on your:

• Existing integrations
• New integrations

Existing Integrations

Existing integrations are not affected by this change. Existing integrations continue to process events in order so if you are happy with your current integrations, no changes are required.

You can update your existing integrations to process events concurrently instead of in order. You can do this by updating an existing integration using the v2/integrations/:Id endpoint (where Id is the Id of the existing integration whose events you now want to process concurrently) and configuring is_concurrent to be true.

New Integrations

For all new integrations, you should ensure that you design your receiving code based on events being delivered concurrently. Events that are delivered concurrently may not be delivered in the order they are created. For example, if the status of an order is updated multiple times, the events may not be delivered in the same sequence they were updated.

Related Resources

You can read more about this enhancement in our documentation. Check out the Elastic Path Commerce Cloud integrations documentation.