Magento eCommerce and Infor SyteLine Integration

Clarity Connect Provides the API Endpoints to Integrate Magento with any Front or Back-office System
The Benefits of a Magento eCommerce and Infor SyteLine Integration

Cost-Effective of Business Growth with Customer Experience

The Infor SyteLine to Magento eCommerce integration enables businesses to scale their operations in a more profitable way, while maintaining a highly personalized and individually focused experience for the end user. One of the great benefits of automating and integrating systems is the ability to scale rapidly and still preserve a hands-on sense or feeling for each individual user. The most important part of this procedure though is to ensure that the actual workflows and business logic are intelligently incorporated. The capability to integrate Magento and Infor SyteLine is just the first step. Going forward, it's critical to work with a partner who can help you select the right processes and choose the appropriate infrastructure. Those aspects will allow you to efficiently handle the traffic, workload, and security as well. The right business partner should have extensive experience within the Magento eCommerce and Infor SyteLine arena, so they can deeply understand the best practices for how to leverage those systems and direct the automation in alignment with your business needs.

When getting started with your Infor SyteLine integration with Magento eCommerce, we recommend reviewing the fundamental aspects, such as the APIs. This extends to making sure that you have the necessary licensing and access to the Infor SyteLine ideas, intelligent data objects, or .NET web services that typically use SOAP as a protocol. The process also involves understanding of the Magento web API and the establishment of a sandbox or testing environment for both of those systems. This comes handy during the validation phase, after the quality assurance of any updates you decided to perform. One of the strong points of an Infor SyteLine integration to Magento eCommerce is the multitude of capabilities it offers, not just up front but as a continuous improvement process too.

Most of the potential capabilities materialize through a two-way integration. In many cases though, it’s only required to integrate in a single direction manner. But it is always possible to essentially integrate any entity or field, be it core or custom, as well as set up any kind of tailored business logic or data transformation. Those actions could be demanded to fully meet the business needs and deliver value to your end customers, versus having to cater to user requirements and desired workflows on a single platform that may not support the complete set of functionality. Some of the most common integrations to consider incorporating include:

  • Customers and accounts
  • Categories and products
  • Sales orders
  • Invoices and quotes
  • Shipments and shipment status
  • Payments
  • Users
  • Locations
  • Custom entities and fields
Selecting Information that is Consistently Compatible with your Business Needs

Overview of Additional Entities for a Meaningful Integration

The integration between Magento eCommerce and Infor SyteLine can be an iterative process where you gradually add entities and functionality. When the time comes to integrate with customers and accounts, we certainly recommend bringing in addresses and contacts as well. On the customer and account level, it may be useful to include customer-specific pricing, pricing levels on products or categories, tax levels or tax exemption status, location data, and credit limits. Contacts can further include roles with location-specific information. Finally, the addresses and all of their associated data types can cover:

  • Billing
  • Shipping
  • Primary
  • Multi-location
  • Domestic
  • International

Another helpful option would be to access past purchases and invoices, making them available from an analytics perspective to enable planning for replacement parts. In the end, the overall account syncing can definitely be a two-way process, but initially the data must pass from the Infor SyteLine system into Magento eCommerce.

Whenever a new user is generated within Magento eCommerce, during checkout or at another stage, that user can then go into Infor SyteLine. This task won’t simply use the basic user data, but also any contact and shipping information from Magento eCommerce back into Infor SyteLine. Along with the user, all the corresponding information below can follow:

  • Sales order data, totals, and subtotals
  • Taxes, tax classes, integration data from Avalara or TaxJar, document IDs, and transaction IDs
  • Line items
  • Shipping, shipping estimates, and fees (UPS, FedEx, USPS, DHL, international shipments, LTL, intermodal, etc.)
  • Customs and duties
  • Discounts applicable on the item, order, or shipping level
  • Payments and transaction data, such as detailed transaction tracking, transaction ID, and profile ID
  • Split shipping or split payments
  • Refunds
  • Support requests and order associations

All of the above data could effectively go from Magento eCommerce into Infor SyteLine through the integration. The key idea is that you can have a multi-directional sync, where information goes back and forth as desired. As an example, sales team members could create quotes in Infor SyteLine that are then integrated with Magento eCommerce. Customers will be able to purchase and checkout on Magento, which will go back into Infor SyteLine in the form of sales orders. Whenever a customer has processed a payment and submitted an order from Magento eCommerce, which in turn went into Infor SyteLine, we also want to make sure that it will get updates whenever it's fulfilled in the warehouse and shipped. Perhaps there's an item transfer from one warehouse to another before the order can be dispatched and this information can also be communicated. Our goal is to take the Infor SyteLine data as it changes and expose it back into Magento eCommerce so the end user can see updates as quickly as possible.

This is the point where automation and integration can dramatically improve customer satisfaction. We can get the status of orders dynamically without having to manually update them in multiple places. Our additional recommendation here is to incorporate the shipment and tracking information from Infor SyteLine back into Magento eCommerce. This will enable you to handle all of the data surrounding an order, along with service and refund requests that might be associated with orders.

Additional Possibilities and Options for a Sterling Integration

Incorporating Logic to Streamline Business Workflows

In addition, it's also very common to populate the catalog system with categories, products, attributes, associations, and relationships between items from Infor SyteLine into Magento eCommerce. This helpfully presents the core data, including details about:

  • SKUs
  • Descriptions
  • Manufacturer information
  • Specs
  • Dimensions
  • Dimensional weight
  • Inventory information

Location information around inventory provides details that are particularly useful within an omnichannel or multi-location environment. General updates are expected to cover pricing data, customer-specific pricing, pricing logic, and quantity breaks. Whenever those integrations execute from Infor SyteLine into Magento eCommerce, it's imperative that some of the data in Magento eCommerce is preserved. This stands true for the catalog system with its categories and products, as they will likely have extended information beyond what's included in Infor SyteLine.

During the update process, it's paramount that we bring in what's needed, for example pricing and inventory data. However, we must not overwrite the extended meta information that's imaged into eCommerce and other rich content that may have been added by the marketing team or a product management team. We strongly encourage you to work with a partner and an integration platform that grant the ability to discreetly and intelligently adjust the business logic with the data transformations that occur for each of the integrations. From a technical aspect, the best way to go about an integration between Magento eCommerce and Infor SyteLine is to leverage a queue-based, scalable, and enterprise-level system that's persistent. Persistence ensures that whenever an integration task needs to run, the job can either complete or keep retrying until it successfully finishes.

The idea behind a queue-based model supports the need to discreetly break out tasks and be able to run individual groups of logic for the integration. In this manner, different single or multiple sets of entities and tables of data can be incorporated. Since every organization is unique, certain logic is utterly specific to your business model and what your customers are expecting in their interactions. Ideally, the data transformations are discreet and controllable to a highly granular level, making sure that everything matches your desired business output.

How Clarity can Help

Magento eCommerce and Infor SyteLine Integration Experts

When considering different integration platforms for Magento and Infor SyteLine, it's vital to work with a partner who has a strong background and related capabilities. If you'd like to receive more information about the Clarity Connect platform and how we can deliver functionality, you're welcome to reach out to us for a complimentary review with one of our knowledgeable and friendly team members. Feel free to click on any of the links on our site and discover further information that might be helpful for your project.

In case you have questions that we weren't able to fully cover about Infor eCommerce on the website materials, click on the Ask the Expert link and we'll be happy to provide you with a timely detailed response. We look forward to hearing from you and will be glad to assist with anything you need for your Magento eCommerce and Infor SyteLine integration.