Integrating an e-shop with a corporate or warehouse system removes manual retyping of data between environments. Typically, products, prices and stock levels are transferred towards the e-shop, and orders, customers and payments back in the other direction. The benefit is up-to-date product availability, fewer errors and faster order fulfilment. When designing the integration, three things need to be resolved: which system is the source of truth for each piece of data, how often the transfer takes place, and what happens on failure – without error handling, orders quietly get lost. Product matching between the systems also needs to be agreed, which tends to be the most demanding part. It is worth first launching the integration on a limited scope and expanding it gradually. The contract with the supplier should also cover who maintains the integration after a version change in either of the systems.
See also: Inventory tracking and reservations, ETL and Data Flow, Master data management.
