Understanding eCommerce Integration with Microsoft Dynamics GP

Whether your company is already selling online or preparing to get started, you might be familiar with the term "eCommerce integration". It's a term that can mean many things, but for the most part it is meant to describe the process of exchanging and synchronizing data between an eCommerce system (online shopping cart platform) and another business application. A well-designed integration enables data to flow bi-directionally between the two systems and for data to only be inputted once. For the purposes of this article we will focus on eCommerce integration with Microsoft Dynamics GP.

The best practice for integrating an eCommerce storefront with an ERP system such as Dynamics GP is to utilize a middleware solution that can automate the processing of customer, order, and item data. There are many reasons why you should employ this best practice (which we'll discuss more below), with the elimination of manual data entry, or "re-keying", being #1.

Picture your company's eCommerce sales volume increasing to 500 orders per month. Without an integration solution in place, the first step in processing a new order would be a data entry resource retrieving the customer and order details from your eCommerce platform and manually re-keying it into Dynamics GP.  Then add in the time it would take to adjust and sync your inventory for the items fulfilled and update the customer order on your storefront with a tracking number. Add all of these steps together and your data entry resource is probably spending 5-10 minutes per order, and a total of 40-80 hours on manual data processing per month.  

With an automated, bi-directional integration, order processing is faster and less labour-intensive. To illustrate this in more detail, let's look at an example data flow ...