Live to Staging Copy

Objective

To simplify seller onboarding, offer better API testing as well as feature rollout support Seller Center offers a smart and efficient way to copy live data in a secure & stable way to the staging environment. This approach guarantees not only data consistency but makes sure to not compromise sensitive seller and user data with guaranteeing a stable connection to 3rd party systems such as Shop or OMS.

In order to request a Live to Staging please raise a TMLSD ticket and state what specific copy you request

  • a single live-to-staging operation, e.g. tomorrow
  • a continuously operated live-to-staging operation in a certain internal, e.g. every week at sunday

Remarks

  • Based on production data based on last nightly backup
  • Generic admin user [email protected] with known password exists for normal login purposes
  • All email addresses are anonymized to the pattern [NUMBER]@sellercenter.net
  • API keys for all users are getting randomly regenerated
  • Customer order related data is anonymized
  • Configuration of communication endpoints for shop and OMS are restored as they were before
  • Assumption that Shop Ids for attributes, attributes sets, brands, categories, products, sellers are identical between the shop live and staging system

Critical KnowledgeWe recommend that all connected systems, mainly Shop & OMS, do use a backup state which is slightly later then the one Seller Center uses. Since the backup process for Seller Center starts at 0:30 am we recommend to use a backup version from around 3am. For both system the Live-To-Staging should have been executed before the Live-to-Staging of Seller Center runs with the slightly newer data.

Products

  • During the Live-to-Staging procedure all products from the live system get copied to the staging system.
  • Once the process is finished, Seller Center does a post-run check whether the products exist in the Staging Shop System
    • If the products do not exist the detected products are moved to the deleted status.
  • This means the live to staging copy from the Shop System should use a backup data version slightly later than the one Seller Center uses in order to avoid inconsistencies between both systems.
    • This assures that the product synchronization between both staging system do work flawlessly and does not get blocked since the both systems have the same products with the same ID ranges
  • The Shop system acts as a Master system for products

Seller

  • Once the Live-to-Staging procedure is done, the systems does a post run check to verify if the seller is also available on the Staging Shop system
    • If there is a mismatch of a seller and does not exists, it get the status “deleted” in Seller Center.
    • Products for those sellers cannot be used in Staging for synchronization purposes

Order

  • Since Seller Center does not have a reliable way on OMS / order side to verify order ids since no direct db connection exists as well no API endpoint for it there is no post-run processin place
  • We do recommend to use a backup for a Live-to-Staging on OMS side slightly after the backup time used by Seller Center
  • The OMS system acts as a Master system for orders & order items

Troubelshooting

Products / orders don’t get synced

In case new products get created in Seller Center and get send to the Shop system but still gets marked in Seller Center as pending, it can be that the Shop backend system provided an id, which is already in use within Seller Center. Therefore a different product can’t have this id assigned.

Best solution would be, that the Shop system returns an id, which is not yet used in Seller Center.

Same behaviour can be found for order import, when the Shop system sends order (item) ids, which are already available in Seller Center. Therefore an update on the ids on Shop side (OMS) is advisable that the ids are higher than the ones used in Seller Center.