How to Synchronise Stock With Your E-commerce Site

One of the more important things about building an e-commerce site is synchronising prices, and possibly stock, from the business software you already use. The best arrangement, of course, is a single solution — that is, having the maker of your ERP supply the e-commerce site as well. If that interests you, you can read more here. That is often not possible, however, so below are the options that remain:

#1. Exporting a file containing all the relevant data, which is then sent to the e-commerce site (synchronisation from the ERP to the site)

Depending on which data the e-commerce site needs, the business software produces a file, usually in .csv format, which is then sent to the site at regular intervals. Some of the data this file can contain includes:

• Product code
• Product name
• Price
• Any discount
• Colour or size (where applicable)

Alongside this file, the images held in the ERP often need synchronising too. The best option here is frequently to keep the images on a third-party platform such as Amazon and synchronise them from there. This approach is probably the easiest for the developers who built your ERP, since producing a file of this kind is relatively straightforward.

#2. Providing an API from the ERP that lets the e-commerce site reach into it (synchronisation from the site to the ERP)

In this case the ERP vendor supplies technical documentation covering the key things that need to be synchronised. Some of those might be: - the item list with all its attributes - stock levels - details for an individual item If required, the ERP's developers can also build additional API functionality — for instance, so that prices set specifically for a particular customer can be synchronised and shown to them when they log in to the e-commerce site with their username and password.