WooCommerce and Dynamics GP Integration

WooCommerce and Dynamics GP integrations can enable very consistent and robust capabilities for improved customer service, enriched information on your eCommerce site, and overall scalability improvements for your business. The Dynamics GP integration to WooCommerce typically leverages one of many different flavors of integration that are possible with Dynamics GP. The most common methods are the eConnect and the Dynamics GP connect, more specifically referred to as the Dynamics GP Web Services. The Web Services are essentially exposing what sits on top of Dynamics GP eConnect, but don't expose as many endpoints. There are additional methods for integration available, but those are the most common for the on-premises version of Dynamics GP.

The Dynamics GP integration exposes the core entities within Dynamics GP, which may also be extended to become highly specific and tailored, including custom fields and entities that might exist within a Dynamics GP instance. Some of the more usual integrations naturally involve products and category data. Bringing products and categories from Dynamics GP into the WooCommerce instance results in a strong catalog system with up-to-date details that include:

• SKUs
• Product meta information
• Customer specific pricing and general pricing
• Inventory levels for all locations, if applicable
• Details around products with custom fields and/or attributes
• Shipping information
• Tax classes and tax details
• References to images or where the images are located
• WooCommerce HIPAA compliance, if necessary

The list is by no means exhaustive so it’s definitely possible to expand, but the general point is that not only product data can come from Dynamics GP. Anything in Dynamics GP can essentially go into your integration and back to WooCommerce. The Dynamics GP can also expose the categories and all of the category information as well. In a similar fashion, it can include things like the category details, descriptions, any information there is in Dynamics GP related to imagery or content, and then ultimately the relationships between the categories and the products.

Expanding the Entities in Alignment to your Business Needs

In addition to products and categories, it's possible to pull customer data from Dynamics GP with relevant contact information, including addresses. In other words, potential different locations, billing and shipping information, or even detailed pricing levels may be drawn into WooCommerce from Dynamics GP. Other examples of customer data are specific terms that are set up for a particular account and details around access to tax information that's applicable to a certain account, which could even cover a possible tax exemption.

Furthermore, extensive order information may be extracted from Dynamics GP and added to WooCommerce. If customers have specific order information, the orders can be pulled from Dynamics GP even when they did not originate inside of WooCommerce. Apart from sales orders, the Dynamics GP order information can also include quotes and invoices. This allows the end user of WooCommerce to add items to cart, checkout, and complete a payment for items that may not have been set up on -or originated inside- WooCommerce. The capability for integrating Dynamics GP with WooCommerce is very potent because Dynamics GP exposes numerous entities and fields that are really critical for businesses to automate. Using the Dynamics GP eConnect in Web Services endpoints enables the inclusion of fulfillment and detailed status information around shipments, as well as any kind of refund processing, transfer of items, or other information from Dynamics GP into WooCommerce.

The capability for completing these integrations leverages the Clarity Connect tool, which is an enterprise class, queue-based, and persistent task management tool that runs integrations for each task between Dynamics GP and WooCommerce. These tasks can be set up so that they are subscribed to, or incorporated with, other integrations as needed.

In general, the Dynamics GP to WooCommerce integration leverages the ability to modify and extend the business logic, by incorporating specific data transformations that match your unique business needs. On the WooCommerce side of things, the REST APIs that are available include the latest version of APIs that are built into the WordPress API framework. However, it’s definitely an option to leverage the legacy versions of the WooCommerce APIs as well. The legacy endpoints can incorporate the WooCommerce specific authentication model, meaning they can be hardened and made to essentially pass automated security validation. It’s strongly recommended to establish a setup where the Clarity Connect integration platform is sitting behind a hardware firewall (and/or other security infrastructure), so that it's properly secured and interacts with WooCommerce and Dynamics GP in a whitelisted way.

The WooCommerce REST endpoints expose a wide array of functionalities and can be expanded very significantly, including WordPress plugins, custom endpoints, and WooCommerce extensions. Some of the more common REST endpoints that are available for the WooCommerce and Dynamics GP integration include:

• Customers
• Orders and order notes
• Products and all their related information, such as variations, attributes, attribute terms, categories, tags, and reviews
• Shipping information like product shipping classes, shipping zones, shipping locations, or shipping zone methods
• Refunds
• Coupons
• Tax rates and tax classes
• Settings and setting options
• Payment gateways
• System status and system status tools
• Reports and detailed capability to drill down into reports

Last but not least, webhooks may be used to provide live data transformation capabilities between WooCommerce and Dynamics GP. Usually it's not a necessity to turn on live data integration, but sometimes it makes a lot of sense to enable real time data transformation for entities such as inventory, a specific event, and a particular deadline or timeline that has to be met. This would cover anything that exhibits high sensitivity to real time data, requiring precise accuracy and up-to-date information without even a minute or 30 second buffer. Such a configuration for live data is definitely possible with the Clarity Connect integration between Dynamics GP and WooCommerce.

Finally, it's important to note that the overall thought process behind the way Clarity Connect platform is architected follows the philosophy of extensibility. At first it allows an initial core functionality of automation and integration between WooCommerce and Dynamics GP but it doesn’t stop here. The Clarity Connect platform enables unending updates and task extensions, by adding further tasks and modifying the workflows inside to make them more vigorous and high fidelity. Moreover, it offers the opportunity to scale out the infrastructure and make it extremely redundant. In this respect, the Clarity Connect platform can be massively scaled up for performance at scale, while remaining failover and disaster proof by employing multiple failovers as needed.

Clarity WooCommerce Integration Experts

The Clarity team is comprised of very friendly and knowledgeable staff who invite you to reach out for a consultation. If you'd like to review your upcoming Dynamics GP and WooCommerce integration, our team welcomes the opportunity to discuss your project details and provide a complimentary needs analysis. You're also encouraged to click on any of the links on this page that provide more related information. In case you have additional questions or topics that you don't see covered on the site, we encourage you to click on the Ask the Experts link below and we'll be happy to provide you with a detailed response to your question free of charge.