A Real-Time Event-Driven Architecture for Retail Price Change Activation with Physical Sign-Off, Compliance Locks, and End-to-End Auditability

Vikas Mittal

Abstract: Retail price changes are not purely digital: in many warehouse/club retail models, a price is considered effective for customers only after a physical shelf/aisle sign is printed and placed by an associate. This introduces a real-time, multi-stage activation pipeline spanning pricing strategy, jurisdictional compliance (state/location price locks), approval workflow, downstream distribution, physical execution, POS activation, and closed-loop confirmation back to the originating pricing system. This paper presents an event-driven reference architecture that treats the end-to-end price change as an auditable business transaction, providing deterministic traceability across hops, near-real-time propagation, and operational controls to detect and resolve stuck activations. The design combines correlation IDs, idempotent event processing, reliable event publication (transactional outbox), workflow orchestration (saga), and end-to-end observability to ensure correctness under retries, duplicates, and partial failures. A case-study evaluation using replay tests and failure-injection demonstrates how explicit state transitions and audit events enable rapid root-cause isolation and significantly reduce time-to-detect and time-to-recover for missed activations.

Keywords: Real-time architecture; Event-driven systems; Retail pricing; Workflow orchestration; Auditability

How to Cite?: Vikas Mittal, "A Real-Time Event-Driven Architecture for Retail Price Change Activation with Physical Sign-Off, Compliance Locks, and End-to-End Auditability", Volume 15 Issue 1, January 2026, International Journal of Science and Research (IJSR), Pages: 1402-1404, https://www.ijsr.net/getabstract.php?paperid=SR26121102047, DOI: https://dx.dx.doi.org/10.21275/SR26121102047

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