Shopping Cart Integration with Acumatica Cloud ERP, what you need to consider.

E-Commerce is very challenging and competitive business and in order to stay on top of the game it requires you to constantly innovate and use powerful shopping cart applications that keep up to industry standards and new shopping cart features such as responsive design, SEO, SEM, Omni channel etc.

As your e-Commerce business is scaling you would want those orders being processed through Order Management system with better inventory management, this is when you are required to integrate with powerful ERP applications such as Acumatica Cloud ERP to have overall efficiency gain.

Plan your ERP integration with Shopping cart, identify the key integration touch-points and the must-have features. We have outlined few integration that Companies should consider while integrating their business process. 

The E-Commerce-ERP Synchronization could be one-way or two-way sync process. It's important to understand the advantages of sync and budgetary needs.

One Way Sync would be order information being pulled from Storefront to ERP system, so you could process all orders from ERP system.

• Orders and Order Details – from your web store to your ERP, this should include Customer information, order header details and line items
• Evaluate your business process, work flow and internal operations as to how you process incoming orders, do they need any processing time, whether you have inventory stock or drop ship type of items
• Whether you accept Credit card authorizations or you capture your payment at sale, evaluate your tax and shipping freight needs
• Most important you need to keep your inventory SKU sync'd with your storefront and ERP system so you have key identifiers always in Sync. 

Two Way Sync allows you to have more flexibility to manage your storefront with easy and to keep price, stock availability updated in real time and cut down your efforts.

• Orders and Order Details – from your web store to your ERP Customer / Account Information the above One way features holds good here.
  
• Catalog Management - Pricing and Inventory sync from your ERP to the web store. Identify what fields need to be Sync'd with your storefront, any business process for listing products
• Price and Stock availability - Sync your pricing and stock availability whether you would like Total stock or available stock or certain percentage of stock to be listed on your storefront.
• Shipment and Tracking Information – As your order processed you may want to sync with your storefront the shipment tracking information 
• Any custom data that needs to be in Sync such as Categories, Manufacturers, Brands, Images etc need to be weighed in at the time of integration

It's worth discussing the budgetary requirements, if you want to keep it simple and easy then One-Way sync is the best way to go, but if your Company needs Two-way sync you will have to plan ahead of time the type of data and have sufficient budget as you work with your vendors and providers.

Few of the shopping carts to consider for integration will be based on the Web services/API/Restful services being available from cart vendors.

We have seen AspdotNet Storefront, Magento, Volusion, 3D Cart, XCart, BIG Commerce, Shopping CartElite and few others have these capabilities to integrate with Acumatica Cloud ERP.

If you are considering integrating your shopping cart with Acumatica Cloud ERP, contact our integration specialists at CloudERP2020 or InfoSourcing Inc.