How to integrate an ecommerce store with an ERP
The concrete steps to plan an ecommerce-ERP integration without it turning into a never-ending project.
1. Define what information needs to travel. The most common integrations are stock, pricing, orders and invoicing — but you rarely need to connect all four at once. Pick whichever causes the most friction today and start there.
2. Decide who's in charge. For every piece of data that travels, there has to be a single system that acts as the source of truth. The ERP usually owns stock and pricing; the ecommerce usually owns new orders. If both systems can write the same data, define clear rules for what happens when they conflict.
3. Choose the sync mechanism. It can be real-time (via webhooks or an API, updating the instant the data changes) or batched (say, every 15 minutes). Real-time makes sense for critical stock; batched is usually enough, and cheaper, for the rest.
4. Plan for what happens when something fails. A sync that fails silently is worse than no integration at all: it creates errors nobody catches until a customer complains. Decide upfront how failures get flagged and who reviews them.
5. Test with real data before going live. Edge cases (a product with no stock, a customer with a special price list, an order with an incomplete address) are what break integrations that looked fine in the demo.