Product Deal Alerts – Way to set deal alerts on specific product

               In this article we will see the product deal alert concept. As an eCommerce user we might be hearing features like instock notifications, Price Alerts. For example, a user is looking at the product to buy, but it is out of stock. In such case the user can set the “InStock” notification. When the product comes to instock in the inventory, the shopper will get the notification and the shopper can visit the site and purchase. These kind of features will enable better user engagement. The shopper no need to come and visit the site  again and again to see the product is instock or not.

                 During the recent experience, I came across a product which I want to buy. The product has better deal but I missed during that time to buy it. Later I was looking every day for that product to see if the deal is available or not. It became tedious process. Then got an idea where I want to have “Deal Alerts” feature for each product. Customers should submit their email address to get the notification on deals available for their product of interest. The sample product details wire-frame with deal alerts feature is given below.

                From the product detail page, if  the shopper wants to get the deal alerts, the shopper will submit the email address. The product deal alerts subscriptions are stored in the database. The system architecture is given below to handle the deal alerts.

           In the above architecture, the “Promotions Feed Importer” will import the promotions to the “Promotions” database. Below are some of the product promotions/discounts conditions where the product is associated directly to the discount.

• BOGO (Buy One Get One)
• Buy Item X Get Item Y 
  • This promotion discounts a specified set of products when the customer purchases another specified item.
• Buy Within Specified Time Frame Get Item Discount
  • This promotion discounts a particular item or items when the customer places an order within the specified time period.
• Get Item Discount (by Product, Category, Brand, etc.)
  • This promotion discounts a specific set of products, which could include a single item, a category, a brand, etc.
• Spend Y Get Item Discount
  • This promotion discounts a particular item or items when a customer spends the specified amount.
• Spend Y in X Get Item Discount
  • This promotion discounts a particular item or items when a customer spends the specified amount in the specified product areas.
• Buy X Get Order Discount
  • This promotion discounts an entire order when the customer purchases the specified item or items.
• Spend Y in X Get Order Discount
  • This promotion discounts an entire order when the customer spends the specified amount in the specified product areas.
• Buy X Get Shipping Discount
  • This promotion discounts shipping costs when the customer purchases a specified item or items.
• Spend Y in X Get Shipping Discount
  • This promotion discounts shipping when the customer spends the specified amount in the specified product areas.

          During the promotions import the importer job will generate the messages for the products which are part of the promotions. The messages available in the queue will be handled by the “DealAlerts Processor“. The “DealAlerts Processor” will check the “Deal Alerts Subscriber” database to see any subscribed product got any deal. If so, the processor will trigger the notification to the shopper.

     You are welcome to comment, debate and to provide suggestions on this blog post.

About Siva Prasad Rao Janapati

Siva Janapati is an Architect with experience in building Cloud Native Microservices architectures, Reactive Systems, Large scale distributed systems, and Serverless Systems. Siva has hands-on in architecture, design, and implementation of scalable systems using Cloud, Java, Go lang, Apache Kafka, Apache Solr, Spring, Spring Boot, Lightbend reactive tech stack, APIGEE edge & on-premise and other open-source, proprietary technologies. Expertise working with and building RESTful, GraphQL APIs. He has successfully delivered multiple applications in retail, telco, and financial services domains. He manages the GitHub(https://github.com/2013techsmarts) where he put the source code of his work related to his blog posts.