Integration7 min
Connecting ERP and e-commerce without double entry
Syncing catalogue, stock and orders looks like a connector problem. It is a problem of deciding who owns the truth for each individual field.
Almost every ERP-to-shop integration fails at the same point: not on technology, but on a question nobody asked at the start. If a product price changes in both systems, which one wins?
Decide the source of truth, field by field
No single system owns everything. As a rule the business system owns records, prices and stock; the shop owns content, images and orders. Writing that down field by field, before a line of code is written, avoids most of the conflicts that otherwise surface in production.
The four syncs you actually need
- Catalogue and prices, system to shop: periodic, because a few minutes of lag does no harm.
- Stock, system to shop: frequent or event-driven, because selling what you do not have is the worst failure.
- Orders, shop to system: immediate and idempotent, so a double send does not create two orders.
- Shipment status, system to shop: this is the one that cuts support requests.
Failure is designed for, not avoided
APIs go down, timeouts happen, formats change without notice. A serious integration queues its exchanges, retries with backoff, flags what will not go through and tells a person. Without that, the first silent failure stays invisible until the accountant finds it.
How to tell whether you are ready
If you can answer three questions, the integration is feasible: where the data lives today, who changes it, and what should happen when two systems disagree. If you cannot, the first job is not a technical one.