Case Study: ALEF Bookstores scales to manage 34,000+ products and achieves sub‑2‑minute stock updates with WooCommerce

How ALEF Bookstores Scaled For 34,000+ Products

ALEF Bookstores, one of Egypt’s fastest‑growing chains, needed to scale its eCommerce presence while keeping a single ERP (Opentaps) as the source of truth for over 34,000 products. They faced tracking and synchronization problems—many books shared identifiers and the initial full XML syncs were slow, memory‑intensive, and risked data inconsistency across warehouse and branch inventories.

The team built a WordPress/WooCommerce site with a custom sync plugin and then optimized it: deferred term counting, split large XMLs, stored and indexed the ERP ID as product meta, and performed batched inserts with AUTOCOMMIT toggled (committing every 10,000). Full-product sync time fell from 18 to about 3 hours, and for stock quantities they exported data to a MySQL view and used a leaner set_stock routine (with AUTOCOMMIT off), cutting the 34,000+ quantity update from ~1 hour to under 2 minutes—making hourly updates practical.

ALEF Bookstores

Galal Aly

ALEF Bookstores