One menu kept up to date across multiple delivery apps
A restaurant chain managed its menus separately on each delivery app, with price and availability mismatches that eventually caused disputes.
The context
The restaurants were listed on several food delivery apps at once. Each platform had its own back office for managing the menu, prices and stock-outs, with no link between them. In practice, this meant making the same update — a dish out of stock, a price change — as many times as there were platforms, with a real risk of missing one. A dish shown as available on an app when it no longer was led to orders being cancelled afterwards, with the customer dissatisfaction that comes with it.
None of these platforms offered a documented public API for this kind of use: their internal workings had to be understood in order to build reliable synchronisation.
What I did
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Analysing each platform's traffic
Studying the network traffic generated by each app's menu-management interfaces, to identify which calls correspond to a price, availability or menu update.
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Building a central menu model
Defining a single source of truth for the menu, prices and availability, which each platform is then fed from.
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Building a connector per platform
One connector per app, translating updates from the central menu into the format and mechanisms specific to each platform.
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Monitoring and alerting
Setting up detection of synchronisation failures, with alerting, rather than silence that would have let a platform drift out of sync unnoticed.
Frequently asked questions
What happens when a platform changes how it works internally?
Can prices differ from one platform to another?
How many platforms can be synchronised at the same time?
Does this approach also work for platforms with an official API?
Describe your need in one minute
A few targeted questions so I can reply with an estimate rather than another questionnaire.