**Foreword**
The 2017 Double 11 shopping festival has just passed, and the Suning Tesco trading system experienced an explosive growth in request volume and order volume on the 11th. It also achieved a record-breaking performance of over 100 million transactions in a short time. The Suning Tesco trading system operated smoothly during the promotional period, successfully supporting the Double 11 event. As the person in charge of the Suning Tesco Trading System, I would like to introduce one of its core systems — the inventory system — and share its architectural evolution and practical experience in preparing for and responding to traffic peaks during major events like Double 11. This article is recommended for architects, technical managers, development engineers, and technical directors who are interested in e-commerce infrastructure and large-scale system design. I hope it brings value and insights to all readers.
**Introduction to Inventory Business and Challenges**
The inventory system plays a crucial role in enterprise-level operations, managing available commodity inventory that is closely tied to the platform catalog. It serves as one of Suning’s core platforms, providing essential services such as inventory lock, unlock, increase, and reduction for both online and offline sales channels and marketing activities. It supports platform merchants by ensuring accurate and real-time inventory data.
As a key component of e-commerce transactions, the inventory system spans the entire business value chain. From procurement, delivery, transfer, and warehousing to product browsing, order processing, and customer support, the inventory system is deeply integrated with various business processes. It also supports big data applications such as business analysis reports, forecast replenishment, and multi-platform sales.
From a business model perspective, inventory is divided into self-operated inventory (stock managed directly by Suning) and C-store inventory (inventory from third-party merchants on the platform). The inventory center focuses on sales-related inventory, supporting all transactional and operational functions across Suning's sales channels. Physical inventory is managed through Suning's logistics platform, while the two types of inventory maintain consistency through regular reconciliation mechanisms.
The inventory system is structured into four main components: inventory trading, inventory management, abnormal management, and operation and maintenance management. The inventory trading module includes features such as sales lock/unlock, delivery lock/unlock, quantity and status inquiries, and activity pre-locking. The inventory management module handles purchasing, transfers, returns, inventory adjustments, reconciliations, and multi-platform distribution. The inventory status feature helps reduce unnecessary queries from external systems by indicating whether a product is in stock or out of stock.
**Challenges Faced by the Inventory System**
The inventory system faces several critical challenges:
- **High Concurrency:** Supporting high-concurrent inventory deductions for popular products during flash sales, group buys, or promotional events.
- **Inventory Turnover:** Improving inventory turnover to maximize capital efficiency and sales.
- **Preventing Overselling:** Ensuring no overselling occurs, which is a fundamental principle in inventory system design.
- **System Scalability:** Building a scalable architecture that can handle unlimited expansion without bottlenecks in databases or queues.
**Evolution of the Inventory System Architecture**
The evolution of Suning’s inventory system can be divided into four key phases:
- **Phase 1 (2005–2012):** The offline chain era, where the system was built on WCS/POS and SAP, with inventory as a module within SAP.
- **Phase 2 (2012–2013):** The O2O e-commerce era, where the system was separated into front-end, middle-office, and back-office architectures, and the SAP inventory system became independent.
- **Phase 3 (2013–2016):** The multi-platform sales era, where Suning expanded to Tmall, adopting a "go commercial software, advocate open source" strategy, leading to the development of a new Java-based inventory system.
- **Phase 4 (2016–Present):** The active inventory era, where the system is deployed in extension rooms and uses a big data inventory distribution engine to enable multi-machine room deployment.
As shown in Figure 3, each phase represents a significant step in the architectural transformation of the inventory system, reflecting the growing demands of e-commerce and the need for more flexible and scalable solutions.
**Early E-commerce Architecture**
In the early stages of e-commerce, the overall system architecture was relatively simple, consisting of basic modules such as warehouse management, point-of-sale systems, and ERP integration. The inventory system was tightly coupled with other business processes, limiting flexibility and scalability. Over time, as the demand for real-time data and higher performance grew, the architecture evolved to support more complex and distributed environments.
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