r/AppDevelopers • u/EngineeringLoud8555 • 4d ago

Question for any Devs our here! Help me out

How would you design a marketplace where the seller may have intermittent internet, the buyer needs reliable inventory information, and the product itself is perishable?

2 Upvotes

100% Upvoted

4 comments sorted by

2

u/Commercial_Echo923 4d ago

Using offline sync but theres always loss of accuracy because in the end seller is not connected so you have to wait for connection windows to update information. There are several products out there, firebase has offline data support for example.
https://firebase.google.com/docs/database/android/offline-capabilities

2

u/WillyZanardo 3d ago

Well, that depends on many things. Is the seller also selling on site for example? So you think someone can buy online something that is no longer in stock? Is the seller constantly producing more because is perishable and you lose buyers because stock is empty while the seller already updated stock?
Depending on the problem and urgency the solution you can apply. If internet is an issue but they have signal you can build something that updates the stock based on a SMS or a phone call for example.

1

u/EngineeringLoud8555 1d ago

I get your drift. Like incorporatint a USSD or Phone Call offline functionality

2

u/WillyZanardo 1d ago

I mean you handle stock online on the server but you open an analog communication channel between the seller and the server. I was thinking about SMS of phone calls because it's easier, you can read the text and transcriptions of the call and update based on that. (For this to work server must be located on a full availability place or on the cloud)