Commerce integrations
Almost nothing in B2B commerce starts life in the shop. Article numbers, weights and tax classes come from the ERP. Technical attributes come from suppliers. Contract prices are negotiated by the Vertrieb and maintained where the Vertrieb maintains them. Stock lives in the warehouse system. And orders have to travel the other way, into the ERP, without anyone retyping them. Whether your shop works is largely decided by whether those flows are reliable. That is why integration is usually the critical path of a commerce project, and why the shop itself is rarely what holds it up.
This area covers both directions. Inward: connecting systems, mapping their fields to yours, scheduling the flows and noticing when one stops. Outward: punchout, the connection that puts your catalog inside your large customers' procurement systems, where their buyers already work. If you sell to companies with a purchasing department, punchout is the part of this area worth reading first.
Two decisions come before any of it: which pattern each flow uses, and which system owns which field. Both are cheap now and expensive later.
Understand
- Integration patterns: batch, real-time and hybrid, and how to choose.
- Deciding your system of record: which system owns which field. Get this wrong and everything else fights.
- Punchout explained: OCI, cXML and openTRANS, selling inside your customer's procurement system.
Set up
- Connect a system: credentials, endpoints and the first handshake.
- Field mapping: translating their field names into yours.
- Set up a punchout: channel, assortment, credentials and the test round.
Work with it
- Build a workflow: Integration Studio, triggers, nodes and actions.
- Events and webhooks: react when something happens.
Keep it healthy
- Monitor your syncs: know a feed broke before your buyers do.
- Common sync errors: what the usual failures mean.