Real-Time Sync

Imagine this frustrating scenario: a customer searches for “winter coats” in your store, finds the perfect one, clicks it, and discovers it’s out of stock. But it was in stock two hours ago, your search just hasn’t updated yet. The customer leaves, annoyed that your site showed them something they can’t buy.

This is the problem real-time sync solves. It ensures your search always reflects your current inventory, pricing, and product information, not yesterday’s data or this morning’s snapshot. Changes appear in search within seconds of happening in your store.

Why real-time matters

In e-commerce, things change constantly. Products sell out. Prices change for sales or promotions. New items get added. Product descriptions get updated. Inventory levels fluctuate throughout the day.

If your search only updates overnight or every few hours, customers see stale information. This creates several problems:

Customers find products that are actually out of stock. They waste time clicking, reading details, maybe even adding to cart, only to discover at checkout that it’s unavailable. Frustrating and likely to make them leave.

Sale prices don’t appear immediately. You launch a flash sale at noon, but search shows old prices until tonight. Customers miss the deal or find conflicting information that erodes trust.

New products stay invisible. You add hot new arrivals, but they don’t show up in search for hours. Meanwhile, customers search for exactly those products and find nothing, assuming you don’t stock them.

Product details are wrong. You fix a typo or update specifications, but search shows the old information. Customers make decisions based on incorrect data.

Each of these is a sale you’re losing to stale search data.

How real-time sync works

When you update a product, changing price, inventory, title, anything, that change needs to flow to your search index immediately. Here’s how modern systems handle this:

The moment you save a product change in your e-commerce platform, the system generates an event: “Product #12345 changed, price updated from $49 to $39”. This event gets sent to a queue or message stream.

Your search system monitors this queue constantly. Within seconds (often under 5 seconds), it receives the event, processes the change, and updates the search index. The next person who searches sees the new price immediately.

This happens asynchronously, in the background. Saving your product change is instant. The search update happens separately without slowing down your admin interface. Customers never wait for indexing.

For high-traffic stores with many simultaneous changes, the system processes events in parallel, handling thousands of updates per minute if needed. Black Friday rush? No problem, real-time sync scales with demand.

What gets synced in real-time

Not all data is equally time-sensitive. Good real-time sync prioritizes:

Critical data (immediate sync):

• Inventory levels and stock status
• Pricing changes and sales
• Product availability (published/unpublished)
• Urgent corrections

Important data (near real-time, under 1 minute):

• Product titles and descriptions
• New product images
• Category changes
• Attribute updates

Less urgent data (can be batched):

• Customer reviews
• View counts and popularity metrics
• Recommendation updates

The system ensures critical business data syncs instantly while optimizing less time-sensitive updates for efficiency.

The out-of-stock problem

Nothing frustrates online shoppers more than finding a product in search that’s actually unavailable. Real-time sync solves this.

Product inventory hits zero. Within 5 seconds, search updates. You can configure how to handle this:

Option 1: Hide the product completely from search results. Prevents frustration but means customers don’t know you stock it.

Option 2: Show it with “Out of Stock” badge. Lets customers sign up for restock notifications, maintaining product awareness.

Option 3: Demote it to the bottom of results. Still findable but doesn’t waste prime result positions.

Most stores use Option 2 or 3, maintaining visibility while being honest about availability.

The key is: customers know immediately. No one wastes time on unavailable products.

Price changes and flash sales

Real-time sync makes dynamic pricing possible. Launch a flash sale at 2pm, customers searching at 2:01pm see the sale prices. No delay, no confusion, no missing the promotion window.

This enables strategies that batch-update systems can’t support:

Time-limited promotions that start and end at precise times.

Dynamic pricing that adjusts based on demand or competition.

Inventory clearance where prices drop as stock dwindles.

All of these require search to reflect changes within minutes (ideally seconds), not hours.

New product visibility

You add exciting new products to your catalog. With batch updates (overnight indexing), these products are invisible in search until tomorrow morning. That’s potentially 12-24 hours of lost sales.

With real-time sync, new products appear in search within seconds of being added. A customer who searches 5 minutes after you add a product finds it immediately.

For trend-driven products or limited releases, this immediate visibility is crucial. Every hour of invisibility is lost revenue.

What this means for your webshop

Real-time sync transforms search from a lagging snapshot into a live reflection of your store. Customers always see current prices, accurate inventory, and all your products, no matter when they shop.

This eliminates a major source of customer frustration. No more disappointment from out-of-stock items appearing available. No confusion from price mismatches. No missing new products that customers specifically came to find.

Modern search solutions like TextAtlas include real-time sync by default. The system monitors your catalog continuously, updating search indexes within seconds of any change. You don’t configure sync schedules or trigger manual updates, it just happens automatically whenever you change something.

From your perspective, search always shows what you expect it to show, your current catalog state, not yesterday’s. This builds customer trust and prevents the sale losses that come from showing outdated information.

Real-time sync isn’t a luxury feature anymore, it’s essential for competitive e-commerce. Customers expect information to be current, and systems that can’t deliver that are at a serious disadvantage.