connect Magento 2 to price/product service

[ZakMageKracken]

I have my own price/product service that I need to connect to Magento. The service has a variable amount of products with very variable prices (scaling up fast, can be in the millions; not the price itself the amount of prices). The price can change with every request a customer makes. So it needs to be fetched every time a customer requests the page at least. But probably even in between, informing him/her of an updated price.

What path should be taken to have a clean implementation in Magento 2?

[ZakMageKracken]

hi to whomever moved this issue:

I'm interested in a general architectural way of implementation and not so much into a concrete implementation. Which is why I asked in "Just ask Alan".

[NirvanaServices]

Unfortunately not, Magento does not work that way, you are talking along the lines of realtime booking system such as travel. The architecture cannot support it, you will need to hook in to the pricing system, it would require weeks or months of testing all the combinations. You will have maintenance issues and cannot just add new code without retesting and/or breaking something, but is it possible. Let's say not realistically, we do know and do use one companies solution for this, but it's for enterprises and not retail. There are a couple of extensions, you might want to try those and see if you can adapt them for your needs.

[ZakMageKracken]

Thanks for your answer but this is exactly what I was not looking for, sorry
Cause just telling "it does not work" does not really clear up the issue for me.
I guess you are trying to say that Magentos architecture does not support real time updates of prices in the checkout process?
Why does it not work, how does it work, how far can I go?
Cause ie. those real time in between updates can be optional.

[NirvanaServices]

To understand you have to know the Magento architecture, it's not something to be explained to those new to the platform, actually it's not something to be explained to those with years of experience in the platform, for all intents and purposes it cannot be done.

It doesn't work because Magento is hardcoded to handle pricing on a per website or global basis, you have to re-engineer the system to work on a global basis and bypass 'every' part of the pricing system. You have latency which will increase page loads, you have stale content issues, you have internal caching which will give strange results ...

What you want to do is the same as Net-A-Porter, a $400million revenue company. Even if it's not realtime you need a dataload solution to push the prices in to the database, the longer the timeframe the easier it is. If you load once a day it's time consuming but doable, every hour it's fairly complex, any faster and you are in enterprise environments, realtime and you are Amazon levels of automation. If you use Magento2 you want PHP7 but most extensions and themes are not PHP7 compatible, so you're on your own. With 1.9x the indexer is the problem, the simplest way to explain it is there are 1,000 problems and 1 solution to them all. The chance of finding that 1 solution is zero, many have tried, a couple have succeeded, Magento has over 2million lines of code.

We actually use this technology and it's faster than the internal pricing, it's a black box system, but the company who implements it are listed on Bloomberg and they were not the architects, that was a higher level company. Anyone wanting to do this will build their own custom platform, you can look at companies like Wiser and how they interact with Magento. You can search Google and it comes up with things like below, however the simple answer is no!

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/19870228/in-magento-is-it-possible-to-populate-your-product-model...

https://community.magento.com/t5/Programming-Questions/Dynamic-Pricing-per-Customer-from-External-AP...

PS. Please be polite, it takes a lot of effort to write this information in a digestible format and we have spent a long time with help from some of best architects in the world to gain this experience, just because it's not the answer you want to hear doesn't mean there is a solution as if there were, Magento would be running the same level of sites that Hybris or WebSphere run, it doesn't!