Underestimating the Complexity of Integrations
Performing an eCommerce platform integration with another business system can seem overly simple at face value. I mean come on, in this world of Artificial Intelligence, API’s and Webservices, don’t all applications just know how to talk to each other out of the box? Despite what some marketplace advertisements will tell you, unfortunately, the answer is an astounding NO!
The reason for this is that even though there may be “standard” integrations for many applications….the exact mix of applications a company owns, the companies own infrastructure, and industry-specific needs create a unique environment for each business. Boilerplate solutions never cover the full gambit of customer needs, so you can only achieve maybe 25-50% automation in even the simplest use cases.
The Dangers of Partial Integration
In many ways, achieving some automation can put your company in a worse position then if they had not attempted at all. Take an eCommerce ERP Integration for example. Let’s say that I wish to create customers in my ERP system when a new user signs up in my eCommerce system.
I install an out of the box plugin provided by my ERP and I turn it on and customers begin to show up in my ERP system. Great! But then as I dig deeper, I realize that the customers are being created with unlimited credit limits, and their default shipping terms are not accurate based on their most common choices. Now my customer service team must remember to go back and update those values manually after they are created.
What if they forget and a customer is able to order $100,000 of goods on credit? Who calls and tells the customer that their credit is no good?
How do we follow up on these partially manual tasks and who checks that it was done and how?
Now the order entry department is frustrated because when they fully controlled the customer creation process they had a great workflow that’s now broken. This is just a simple case of the problems that arise from cookie cutter integrations.
That’s why it is critical to design your integration process in a flexible way.
In almost all eCommerce integration options there will be dozens of details that just don’t fit into standardized boxes and the only way to achieve full automation and get the full business value is to be able to bridge those gaps with very flexible software.
Summary
Whether you are writing your own custom programs or choosing a platform like DocInfusion to perform your eCommerce integrations, be sure it can handle these seemingly small details (as they say, the devil is in the details). In any integration task, those details are everything! So your solution must be able to account for them.
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