Beam Domain Context

What Is Beam?

Beam enables dropshipping by syncing products FROM Violet TO destination e-commerce platforms (Shopify) and processing orders back.

Beam vs Prism

	Prism	Beam
Direction	Read Products, Write Orders	Write Products, Read Orders
Flow	Ingest products from stores → Create orders there	Publish Violet products to destinations → Read orders back
Customer	Channels (marketplaces, platforms)	Destination merchants (dropshippers)
End User	Merchants (suppliers)	Shoppers on destination stores

Key Value Proposition: Enables destination merchants to dropship products from multiple Violet suppliers through their own Shopify stores without holding inventory.

Core Data Model

Collection	Purpose	Key Fields
Shops	Destination Shopify stores	shopId, accessToken, scopes
Products	Published products	shopId, violetOfferId, shopifyProductId
Variants	Product variants	sku, violetSkuId, shopifyVariantId
Orders	Shopify orders	orderId, lineItems, fulfillmentStatus
Fulfillments	Fulfillment tracking	orderId, trackingNumber, status
Mappings	Variant SKU mappings	sourceSkuId, shopifyVariantId, confidence
SyncLogs	Audit trail	timestamp, action, status, errors

Core Temporal Workflows

Workflow	Purpose	Trigger
CatalogSyncWorkflow	Sync products to Shopify	Scheduled / manual
ProductPublishWorkflow	Publish single product	API / event
OrderProcessingWorkflow	Process Shopify order	Webhook
FulfillmentWorkflow	Handle fulfillment updates	Violet event
ReconciliationWorkflow	Fix data inconsistencies	Scheduled
VariantMappingWorkflow	Resolve SKU mappings	On demand

Key Principles

1. Reliability Over Speed

Beam's value is making dropshipping reliable:

• Order accuracy (right products, right quantities)
• Fulfillment tracking (customers know where orders are)
• Data consistency (Shopify ↔ Violet sync)

2. Self-Healing Systems

Design for automatic recovery:

• Reconciliation workflows detect and fix issues
• Confidence scoring for variant mappings
• Retry logic with exponential backoff
• Dead letter queues for failed webhooks

3. Shopify-First

Focus on Shopify until perfected:

• Deep integration (OAuth, webhooks, GraphQL)
• Handle all edge cases (partial fulfillment, cancellations, refunds)
• Stay current with Shopify API changes

4. Multi-Vendor Complexity

Single Shopify orders can have products from multiple Violet merchants:

• Split orders into multiple Violet bags
• Track fulfillment per line item
• Handle partial fulfillments gracefully

Key Metrics

Metric	Target	Alert Threshold
Order Success Rate	>98%	<95%
Product Sync Latency	<5 min	>10 min
Webhook Processing	<30s	>60s
Fulfillment Accuracy	>99%	<97%
Broken Mappings	<0.1%	>1%

Key Repositories

Repo	Purpose
BeamService	Main backend service (Java 21, Spring Boot)
BeamContextLibrary	Documentation & context
beam-migrations	Database migrations
beam-brain	Product brain (specs, strategy)