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Integrating ERP for Price Management

Integrating ERP for Price Management with CoreConnect, Keeping Your Commerce Engine in Sync

Managing product prices efficiently across your systems is key to running a successful e-commerce business. In many cases, your Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system is the central hub for handling prices, but those prices also need to be reflected in your online store’s Commerce Engine. This recipe will guide you through integrating your ERP system with your Commerce Engine using CoreConnect, ensuring that prices are always up-to-date, whether through real-time updates or a daily synchronisation process.

Let’s walk through how CoreConnect enables seamless price management between your Commerce Engine and ERP.

Setting the Stage: What You Need to Know

In this integration, the ERP is the source of truth for product prices, and the Commerce Engine needs to reflect any price changes from the ERP. CoreConnect will handle the communication between the two systems. Here are the two main ways CoreConnect will update prices:

  1. Real-time Price Updates via Webhooks: When the ERP system updates a product’s price, it sends a webhook notification to CoreConnect, which then updates the price in the Commerce Engine.
  2. Daily Sync: To ensure that no price updates are missed, CoreConnect will perform a daily sync between the ERP and Commerce Engine, updating the prices of all products and their variants.

Before getting started, make sure:

  • CoreConnect: Is configured to handle webhook events from the ERP and perform scheduled tasks like the daily sync.
  • ERP: Is set up to send webhook notifications for price updates and allows API access for CoreConnect to retrieve product data.
  • Commerce Engine: Has endpoints available to update product prices and variants.

Real-time Price Updates: Using ERP Webhooks

Imagine a scenario where your ERP system updates the price of a product, whether due to a sale, a supplier change, or inventory fluctuations. This new price must be reflected in your online store as soon as possible. With CoreConnect, this process happens in real-time via webhooks.

  1. Price Update in ERP: When the price of a product is updated in the ERP, it triggers a webhook event.
  2. ERP Sends Webhook to CoreConnect: The ERP sends a webhook to CoreConnect with details about the product and its new price.
  3. CoreConnect Updates the Price in Commerce Engine: CoreConnect processes the webhook and uses the product identifier (e.g., SKU) to update the corresponding product’s price in the Commerce Engine.

This real-time price sync ensures that your online store always displays the most up-to-date prices, reducing the risk of discrepancies between your ERP and the Commerce Engine.

image.png In this diagram, you can see that CoreConnect acts as the middleman between the ERP and the Commerce Engine, ensuring that the Commerce Engine is immediately updated as soon as the ERP sends a price update.

Daily Price Sync: Ensuring Accuracy

While real-time updates are ideal for keeping prices up-to-date, sometimes webhook events can fail or get missed due to network issues or other unforeseen problems. To prevent discrepancies between your ERP and Commerce Engine, CoreConnect also performs a daily price sync.

  1. Scheduled Sync: CoreConnect initiates a scheduled task once a day (or at another configured interval) to sync product prices between the ERP and Commerce Engine.
  2. Retrieving Prices from ERP: CoreConnect pulls the latest price data for all products and variants from the ERP system via an API call.
  3. Updating Prices in Commerce Engine: CoreConnect then compares the prices in the Commerce Engine to those in the ERP. If any discrepancies are found, the prices in the Commerce Engine are updated to match the ERP.

By performing a daily sync, you can ensure that your Commerce Engine will still have the correct prices even if a webhook fails or is missed.

image.png

This diagram shows the steps CoreConnect takes during the daily sync, retrieving prices from the ERP and updating any discrepancies in the Commerce Engine.

Key Considerations

Handling Variants

If your products have variants (such as different sizes, colors, or configurations), CoreConnect ensures that price updates for each variant are handled correctly. The ERP needs to provide the specific price for each variant in the webhook or API response. CoreConnect will then process these updates and reflect the correct prices for each variant in the Commerce Engine, ensuring that all price changes—whether for the base product or its variants—are accurately represented.

Sales and Pre-scheduled Price Changes

During events like a summer sale, it’s common to adjust prices in bulk ahead of time. Many Commerce Engines support pre-scheduled price changes, allowing you to set start and end dates for sale prices. For example, if the regular price of a product is 10 euros, you might want it to drop to 7 euros (a 30% discount) starting in two weeks. CoreConnect can work with the Commerce Engine’s scheduling functionality, ensuring that future sale prices are reflected in your store when the sale begins. The ERP can send future price updates with an effective date, allowing CoreConnect to push these changes to the Commerce Engine at the appropriate time.

Alternatives to Webhooks

Not all ERP systems support webhook notifications to push price updates in real time. In cases where webhooks aren’t available, CoreConnect can rely on other methods, such as a more frequent price synchronization. Instead of relying solely on the daily price sync, you could configure CoreConnect to perform periodic delta syncs (e.g., every hour). During a delta sync, only the prices of products that have changed within the last hour are updated in the Commerce Engine. This approach helps keep prices relatively current even without real-time webhook support.

Prioritizing Webhooks Over Syncs

While regular syncs (whether daily or more frequent delta syncs) ensure long-term consistency, webhooks should always be prioritized when available. Real-time webhook updates provide immediate feedback to your online store, reducing the time between a price change in the ERP and its reflection in the Commerce Engine. This minimizes the risk of customers seeing outdated prices, especially during rapid price changes like flash sales or inventory adjustments. Syncs act as a backup mechanism to catch any missed or delayed webhook events, but the responsiveness of webhooks is key to maintaining up-to-date pricing.

Wrapping It Up: A Unified Pricing Strategy

Integrating your ERP with the Commerce Engine through CoreConnect creates a unified pricing strategy that ensures accuracy and timeliness across your systems. With real-time price updates and daily synchronisation in place, you can rest assured that your product prices in the Commerce Engine will always reflect the latest changes from your ERP.

Whether a price change happens because of a discount, an inventory update, or a supplier shift, CoreConnect ensures that your Commerce Engine keeps up. This allows you to focus on growing your business while maintaining a seamless and up-to-date online store.