Guide to integrating wholesale eCommerce with your ERP
Author’s Note: I’m writing this article as a software developer. That said, I’m aiming it at anyone involved in making a decision around wholesale eCommerce. If you have asked the question ‘How will this wholesale eCommerce work with our existing systems?’, this article is for you. If the language goes nerdy/too technical at any stage, bear with it. It will definitely help to make your journey of planning and deploying wholesale eCommerce easier.
Please do ping me or comment below and let me know if you have any questions. Happy to help!
The most important step in integrating any two software systems is planning. You need to know what information to send into your wholesale eCommerce system. And you most certainly need to know what info you want to get back into your ERP.
Let’s start with the big ones for wholesale eCommerce
Two of the major features in a wholesale eCommerce system are:
- 1. Accessing products and Pricelists: To provide your trade customers with convenient way to get real-time product information, including the up-to-date pricelist, anytime they need it.
- 2. Online orders: To accept online orders and order information like labelling details, signatures, acceptance of T&Cs, payment method etc.
So, what do we ‘feed’ in and out?
- Products: For simplicity’s sake in this article, I’m assuming that you are happy to update your products information like photos etc manually. To upload product photos etc, your wholesale team logs in to the wholesale eCommerce CMS (content management system), similar to how you do on your facebook page etc. Of course sending product information from somewhere else can also be automated. So, let’s look at pricelists and orders.
- Pricelists: Now, let’s say you use your ERP system to update your pricelists. What is more, you don’t want to update pricelists more than once. That would take extra time and effort. It could possibly lead to mistakes. Once is clean and once is enough.
- Orders: Your orders placed online need to feed back smoothly into your ERP and other systems in order for the production and distribution team to take the appropriate actions. This needs to happen in real-time when the order is placed.
Pricelists in: As a result, you need to ‘feed’ your wholesale eCommerce system with the updated pricelists. It needs to be automatic.
Orders out:And you need to ‘feed’ your ERP and other systems with the orders placed online, along with relevant order details.
Pricelists in
Let’s think about pricelists first. Your ERP system probably has a few ways to export pricelists automatically. Maybe this is via a .csv file or another type of file that’s easy for a computer to read. Or maybe your ERP system has an API that can send and receive information from other systems.
Note: If those last two sentences were too jargon-y, I’m kinda saying, you can deliver the information from the ERP to wholesale eCommerce whatever way your system normally does deliveries … whether it’s by courier, your van, or even by bicycle- whatever works for you and your systems.
With the caveat: the information has to be in a format that can be accurately read by a computer. Think about it, a handwritten pricelist sent to your wholesale eCommerce system won’t lead to very accurate results.
So now that you have a way of sending pricelists, brilliant! Next, the wholesale eCommerce system needs to import the pricelist using a simple import tool. This import tool’s job is:
‘Whenever a pricelist comes in for X customer or customer group, match the pricelist information product by product, and import the new prices’.
Simple right? And extremely tedious for us humans if it happens too often, so it’s definitely something worth considering automating it.
But first, make sure integrating via automation is appropriate
While this is an article about integration, it’s always worth looking at the costs and benefits of different ways to do a task.
By starting with a person doing the task (instead of automation), you get a good sense of:
- 1. how often this kind of import needs to be done, and
- 2. how much time and effort it takes to do.
It is worth remembering that wholesale eCommerce systems like B2Bfitter give you options to ‘copy’ or clone a pricelist. In this way you can update a new pricelist based on an old one.
So there are often simple alternatives to integration. This is especially true if your pricelists usually only require minor tweaking- change a price here and there. Or if they don’t get updated that regularly. Either way, starting with a person doing the work is a great way to assess this. Now back to integrations…
Orders out
So now that we have worked out how to manage pricelists, time to look at orders. Let us see how we get the orders out of the wholesale eCommerce system and back into your ERP. Well, it’s pretty much like pricelists, except in reverse.
Golden rule of integration: If you have at least one way to get the order information out of the wholesale eCommerce system, and one way to get the order information into your ERP system, you are golden.
- The first key step is to find out what methods of importing orders works best for your ERP system. Is it via EDI, csv (or other file types) or via an API?
- The next step is to get that information out of the wholesale eCommerce system. Good idea to get in touch with your wholesale eCommerce supplier on this. B2Bfitter exports via API as JSON by default. We also happily export to the format you need.
- The key now is transforming the order information that the wholesale eCommerce system send, into a format that your ERP can read. You will need import tool for importing orders into your ERP.
Where will you get this import tool? It might already exist as part of your ERP solution. Or you might build it internally. Or you might ask your ERP supplier, or wholesale eCommerce supplier to assist you with it. There’s a good chance that one or both may already have a ready-made solution that simply need to be configured for you.
There are also plenty of third party integration specialists and platforms, likeMulesoft that can help transform the order information into the format you need it, using ready-made easily-configurable solutions.
Planning Checklist
Congratulations and thanks for reading! You now have an overview of the information you need to plan the integration of your ERP with wholesale eCommerce.
As a short checklist:
1. Do I need an integration yet? Should I first get my people working with both systems until there’s sufficient work on managing pricelists and orders to justify an integration?
2. How can I automatically export pricelists out of my ERP? What format is it in? (e.g common formats are via .csv, via API as JSON, via API as XML)
3. Does my wholesale eCommerce system have a simple way to import pricelists? Who’s going to set up and manage the import tool? (Often this involves a combination of to-dos for the business + wholesale eCommerce supplier)
4. How can I export orders from my wholesale eCommerce system? (ask your wholesale eCommerce supplier. B2Bfitter exports via API as JSON by default. We also happily export to the format you need).
5. Does my ERP have a simple way to import orders? Who’s going to set up and manage the import tool? (Usually to set this up this, there’s combination of to-dos for the business, working with either the ERP supplier, or the wholesale eCommerce supplier, or both.)
If you plan to integrate wholesale eCommerce and ERP, good luck and hope this article helps you. If you have any questions don’t hesitate to get in touch.
This is art Three in our helpful guide to Planning and deploying wholesale eCommerce.
Previous: 2. Wholesale eCommerce — Preparing the business case
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