adjl posted...
That's always a little unintuitive, since one would expect that in the year of our lord 2025 inventory systems should be able to update themselves automatically whenever a sale is made and the online product finder should be able to tap into that real-time data, but I guess there are a lot of legacy inventory systems out there that aren't fully integrated with the PoS system or online tracking, which the general public doesn't necessarily recognize or appreciate.
Dealing with that often, I can answer.
You don't want production websites accessing internal data like that. That leads to data breaches.
So instead the sites maintain their own copies of the data, and usually either a cron job, or a queue updates matching changes with the source. This is where your time delay comes from.