Why are event/promotional products always synced late?

SSG.COM's affiliate product syncing had long been processed using an FCFS (First-Come, First-Served) method, in which products modified first were synced first. As a result, urgent items like event/promotional products were repeatedly pushed back behind earlier queues and reflected late, revealing the limits of simply increasing sync speed alone.

During product registration, the massive volume of product information coming in from APIs, partners, back-office systems, etc. goes through about 150 Validation logics, and policies for each affiliate partner are also verified together. For example, Gmarket blocks cash-on-delivery products, and Naver has a 25-character limit per option, requiring information processing. Sync failures can also occur due to policy mismatches or communication errors, and these failure reasons are managed on a single screen.

During product modification, since product information is distributed across multiple teams' MSA, each team's events are received to perform affiliate syncing. When inventory changes, it piles up in an inventory modification Queue for each affiliate channel, and the next product is only processed after the preceding task finishes — a structure that made it easy for important products to get pushed back. In particular, Gmarket even has a 1,000RPM limit, further delaying the reflection of key products.

To solve this problem, SoAP (Score of Affiliate Products), i.e., an affiliate product score, was introduced. The core idea is to score a product's importance and rearrange the sync order, with the score calculated not in real time but via daily batch. The goal was to create a sortable priority score while avoiding the inefficiency of calculating it for every one of the nearly 60 million requests per day at maximum.

SoAP consists of four BOOLEAN attributes.

• Whether it is an affiliate event/promotional product: Defined as an event product for products that are excluded from dual pricing application under the affiliate's dual pricing scheme
• Whether it is an affiliate order: Weights are applied differentially based on quarter/half-year/year criteria
• Whether it is an SSG BEST product: The top 3,000 items are accumulated daily
• Whether it is an SSG Dynamic Pricing key product: Uses DP key product and new product information

Additional candidates included products with high selling prices, new products, and products unavailable for purchase due to real-time inventory checks, but some lacked sufficient justification or were separated out into other enhancement tasks. Notably, the overlap ratio between BEST products and DP key products was around 17%, and these products were designed to also receive duplicate scores in SoAP.

The application results were also confirmed with numbers. After introducing SoAP, the sync speed for key affiliate products improved by an average of about 56.4%, with some segments reduced by as much as 76%. Qualitatively, unnecessary back-and-forth with the sales department decreased, and as a structure was established that could explain why certain products were synced first, operational trust also increased.

Remaining challenges are also clear. Going forward, it will be possible to predict which products will become SoAP based on historical data, or to adopt different scoring systems depending on channel characteristics, such as lifestyle versus grocery. Ultimately, the core was not simply improving speed, but optimizing the sync order to process important products first.