🏬 Centric

Centric (Storeworld) is SPAR's back-office system for customers, orders and product data. The SPAR platform talks to Centric in two ways:

• A file exchange: Centric drops assortment and pricing files on an FTP server for the platform to pick up. See Data imports & exports.
• A live connection: the platform calls Centric directly and waits for an answer — for example, fetching a customer's delivery addresses, or placing an order.

This page explains what happens when that live connection struggles.

🚦 Automatic pause when Centric is struggling

When Centric's live connection is slow or unreachable, the platform doesn't keep hammering it with requests. It uses a safety mechanism (technically called a circuit breaker, like the fuse box in your house) that pauses calls to Centric for a short time once it's clear something is wrong — instead of letting every request hang and fail slowly, which would make the whole website feel sluggish.

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• Normal — every call is sent to Centric as usual.
• Paused — after 5 failures in a row, the platform stops trying: for the next 30 seconds, calls to Centric fail immediately on the SPAR side, without even attempting to reach Centric.
• Testing — after 30 seconds, the next single call is let through as a test. If it succeeds, things go back to normal. If it fails, the pause continues for another 30 seconds.

🚫 What counts as a "failure"

Only genuine connectivity/availability problems count toward the 5-failure threshold:

• Centric's service being unreachable or refusing the connection.
• Centric's service timing out (not responding within the configured time).

Business errors — like "this email address is already registered" or "invalid postal code" — do not count. Those are normal responses from Centric, not signs that the service is struggling, so they never trigger a pause.