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By Carole Achramowicz, VP, Product Marketing
Originally published Jan. 11, 2024
In the dynamic, ever-evolving ecommerce landscape, where online sales are projected to account for 22.5% of total retail sales by 2028, building a robust and agile tech stack is imperative for businesses to stay competitive and provide superior customer experiences. Among the key components of this tech stack, Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) integration plays a pivotal role.
Integration platform as a service (iPaaS) offers a simple, modern solution for seamlessly facilitating, orchestrating, and automating data across your ERP and ecommerce platform. Harnessing iPaaS to bridge the gap between these systems not only enhances operational efficiency, but also provides a unified framework for digital transformation.
What is ERP ecommerce integration?
ERP ecommerce integration is the process of connecting backend enterprise resource planning systems (like NetSuite or Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central) with ecommerce platforms (like Shopify or BigCommerce).
Connecting your ERP system to your ecommerce platform ensures that data related to sales orders, inventory, pricing, and customers is consistently updated and integrated across both systems. However, integrating these two platforms comes with its own set of distinct challenges.
Challenges in ecommerce ERP integration (and how iPaaS solves them)
Conventional ERP integration methods bring about various obstacles, including:
Application boundaries
One of the primary challenges in ERP and ecommerce integration is understanding and respecting the distinct purposes of each system. For instance, in the context of orders, ecommerce systems are tailored to handle hundreds of thousands of requests in a short period of time, a task for which ERP systems, in general, aren’t designed to handle at that scale.
Adopting an integration approach that is decoupled yet maintains data synchronization is imperative to handle this throughput mismatch between ecommerce and ERP systems. iPaaS offers the flexibility to build both real-time and batch integrations. Through the low-code UI, you can create integration processes tailored to your specific requirements, whether requiring immediate data synchronization or scheduled batch updates.
Diverse data structures and protocols
ERP and ecommerce systems often employ distinct data structures and communication protocols, leading to complexity with data mapping and transformation between systems.
An iPaaS simplifies data mapping with intuitive, UI-driven capabilities. iPaaS enables users to easily map data structures between ecommerce and ERP systems with a straightforward drag-and-drop interface, ensuring seamless communication.
Customizations
Customizations in ERP systems can complicate integrations, requiring tailored solutions.
iPaaS solutions that are designed with customization in mind provide out-of-the-box support for customization within the ERP systems, allowing users to implement integrations with custom Business APIs (BAPIs), Remote Function Calls (RFCs), and Intermediate Documents (IDOCs) without extensive expertise.
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The benefits of effective ecommerce ERP integration
Implemented effectively, ERP and ecommerce integration improves data visibility and enables automation to unlock the following benefits:
- Lower operational costs: Automated data flows eliminate manual data entry, order tracking, and reconciliation, reducing labor expenses while minimizing costly human errors.
- More accurate data: Real-time data syncing ensures consistent, up-to-date information across systems, creating a single source of truth.
- Improved operational efficiency: End-to-end process coordination enables faster order processing, better inventory management, and smoother fulfillment operations.
- Stronger competitive advantage: Immediate access to accurate customer and order data empowers sales teams to act quickly, personalize offers, and capitalize on cross-sell and upsell opportunities.
ERP and ecommerce integration example: VTEX & SAP
Let’s see what ecommerce to ERP integration success looks like for three businesses who integrated their ecommerce platform, VTEX, with their SAP ERP system sing Jitterbit’s low-code iPaaS platform.
