SOP transaction could be either Invoice (with Credit Card deposits, in B2C ecommerce scenario), Return, Sales Order (where you would like to control fulfillment in separate process, probably in Warehouse Management System) or even Quote (useful in B2B ecommerce scenario, when you sell on account and you would like your customers to be able to configure the Quote with their price levels, possible bundles with additional discounts, etc.). Well, you may say, these mappings look absolutely natural and great to me, but how they could be realized or programmed? And by the way – we have existing ecommerce website, which we coded in-house with our IT programmers – we would like to preserve this ecommerce web application. Let’s try to look at your options:
1. Real-time, Quasi real-time and scheduled integrations. We recommend you to review this “theoretical” question first, as the answer might save you a lot of software development or ecommerce product software licensing money. What is real-time ecommerce shopping cart integration? –this is when customer submits the order, the SOP document shows up in the Dynamics GP at the same moment (with reasonable delay for your Server to run real time integration code, maybe one or two seconds). Is real time important? The answer depends. Let’s say, you have several thousand transactions per hour (meaning that your ecommerce page submits maybe one transaction in the matter of few seconds), and order processing time is so important, that you absolutely need to inform your ecommerce customer in a matter of several minutes, that his or her order was received and allocated, and here you have your UPS or FedEx shipping tracking number with estimated delivery tomorrow morning (or in three to five business/calendar days). If this about to be your situation, real time B2C and B2B ecommerce integration might be considered as required feature. But what if you can wait, let’s say five or twenty minutes and send the batch of “order received” confirming emails to your ecommerce newcomers or returning customers? If this is acceptable or even if this is optimal way of doing business, then you can schedule the integration and move shopping carts into Dynamics GP SOP transactions every few minutes (or maybe ten or even twenty minutes). This scenario is quasi real time ecommerce integration, and you may consider implement it. Now, let’s consider the case, when you are selling something really expensive and you do not expect more than a dozen shopping carts per business day. When customer places the order, you may immediately trigger responding email, indicating that the order is received, and then you may run integration overnight or in the morning hours and at the end of the business day (twice per day, taking Saturday and Sunday as days off). This scenario is integration on demand or scheduled integration
2. How each of the ecommerce shopping eCommerce website development agency cart integration scenarios could be implemented with minimal cost? We expect that you would guess – real-time integration is the most luxury approach and probably commands the highest implementation price. And you are absolutely correct, real time requires eConnect custom programming (or such tools, as Order Connector, available from Alba Spectrum, where the set of SQL Stored procedures is more intuitive and doesn’t require SQL programmer to get exposure to eConnect objects and learning curve). We do not recommend ad-hoc SQL programming (writing Stored Procedures with limited exposure to Dynamics GP table structure and data flow, Dynamics GP is mid-market Corporate ERP and MRP application and its data flow is pretty complex). Let’s now move on to the customers, where you do not need real-time power and you would be quite happy with quasi real time shopping cart integration approach. Here you may avoid custom programing phase and directly deploy such end user friendly tool as Dynamics GP Integration Manager. IM could be scheduled to fire every certain number of minutes (maybe even every minute, but more realistically every five, ten, or twenty).