Real-time pricing engine integrated with external pricing feeds driving an omnichannel e-commerce platform

A physical gold distribution company was building a modern omnichannel platform to significantly increase their market share.

Physical gold selling is a low-margin high-price business that requires strict margin and price control. As gold price fluctuates intraday there is a significant risk of mispricing caused by delay to price updates or distribution what may easily end with a margin loss.

The business objective was to build a fast price distribution system driven by a custom calculation engine allowing automated margin updated intraday populated with real time price feeds from physical gold trading markets like London Metal Exchange and distributors listings. This would enable the client to easily run multiple sales channels including numerous specialistic e-commerce websites as well as physical stores, and always provide accurate price and margin for their whole product portfolio.

A custom solution based on Mule Runtime was designed and implemented to create high performance intraday base price load/update process synchronizing quotations from multiple sources with a real time pricing engine that recalculating and distributing offer prices based on base price, product type, target sales channel and margin levels that could be defined statically or dynamically according to automated rules.

We created Price Control and Monitoring Portal that enabled the client to configure the price engine settings and review the historical prices from a custom web application. The final prices were distributed with multiple channels to both on-premise custom stores websites and third party cloud e-commerce platforms.

The ability to control the price and margin in real time in multiple sales platforms enabled the client to expand and increase the number of target channels. Automated, instant distribution of price updates significantly decreased the number of mispricing events and removed the risk of human errors in price setting. A centralised price configuration portal became a key system for the client controlling their omnichannel revenue stream.