Real-time inventory check

With real-time inventory check, HCL Commerce checks the availability information of items from Sterling Order Management. Real-time inventory check is used to check inventory against an online store, or against a physical store for the buy online, pick up in-store option.

When an order is submitted for an online store, real-time inventory check in HCL Commerce calls Sterling Order Management through the Service Definition Framework. HCL Commerce checks the local cache first to get the information about the available inventory. If the available inventory information does exist in cache and has not expired, it is returned from the cache. If it does not exist in cache or the cache entry has expired, HCL Commerce calls the getInventoryAvailability outbound service.

When an order is submitted to be picked up in-store, the real-time inventory check ignores the local cache. It directly calls Sterling Order Management through the Service Definition Framework, because the inventory is checked against a physical store. When inventory is not available in Sterling Order Management, inventory is updated as zero in the INVAVL table in HCL Commerce and no other real time inventory calls are made to Sterling Order Management. The information can be updated by RTAM.