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Automated inventory transfer from discontinued products to their replacements across 600+ stores

Overview

Built at Amazon WW Grocery, this system automatically transfers on-hand inventory from a discontinued product to its replacement when the catalog merges them, across 600+ stores.

I drove the design and implementation across 3 partner teams and mentored 5+ junior engineers through the build.

Business Impact

$1.55M
Projected Annual Savings
From automating inventory transfers between merged products
< 24 hours
Reconciliation Time
Down from thousands of hours of reconciliation
600+
Stores Covered
Transfers run across the full store network
3
Partner Teams
Design and delivery coordinated across team boundaries

Technical Architecture

  • •Event-driven pipeline using AWS SNS and SQS to ingest catalog merge signals
  • •DynamoDB tracks each merge from the moment it is received through completion
  • •Scheduled AWS Batch job re-checks inventory on a cadence and moves stock until it fully clears
  • •S3 snapshots serve inventory lookups for the batch job
  • •DynamoDB TTL cleans up completed merge records automatically

Leadership

  • ✓Drove design and implementation across 3 partner teams
  • ✓Mentored 5+ junior engineers through design, implementation, and delivery

Technologies Used

Messaging

SNSSQS

Compute

AWS Batch

Storage

DynamoDBS3

Frequently Asked Questions

What triggers an inventory transfer?

Catalog merge signals. They are published over SNS and consumed through SQS, and each merge is recorded in DynamoDB so its progress can be tracked through completion.

Why a scheduled job instead of a single transfer?

A scheduled AWS Batch job re-checks inventory on a cadence and keeps moving stock until the discontinued product fully clears, rather than relying on a single pass.

How are finished merges cleaned up?

Merge tracking records in DynamoDB carry a TTL, so they expire automatically once they are no longer needed.