Magento eCommerce to FinancialForce Integration

Clarity Connect Provides the API Endpoints to Integrate Magento with any Front or Back-office System
Advantages for a Magento eCommerce to FinancialForce Integration

Combining Scalability with a Unique Customer Experience

A FinancialForce integration to Magento eCommerce can enable a scalable infrastructure for delivering personalized service, along with customized support and customer interaction. Setting up an integration between FinancialForce and Magento eCommerce can be very challenging in order to establish the optimal configuration within the respective frameworks. This includes the business logic, the workflows, as well as the technical architecture to ensure that the application integration will run smoothly and effectively. To safeguard a favorable outcome with your FinancialForce integration to Magento eCommerce, we highly recommend that you work with a partner with demonstrated success in delivering excellent results on similar integrations with what your business needs. An added qualification is experience within similar industries or concepts that your business requires, while possessing the ability to expertly configure and work with both FinancialForce and Magento.

From a setup and configuration perspective, Magento eCommerce uses the Magento web API framework and FinancialForce uses REST API endpoints. These endpoints have the ability to expose essentially any of the core or custom entities and fields within sales of FinancialForce and Magento eCommerce. Although all these fields are available, it's important to follow best practices with regard to business logic so that you can ensure the full advantages of building capabilities and FinancialForce imaging into Magento. That's why we advise you to collaborate with a partner who has considerable experience with these applications and possesses the necessary skills to deliver capabilities that match up to your company’s usage of FinancialForce and Magento eCommerce.

In addition, the integration platform itself needs to be reliable, scalable, adaptive, and customizable to your specific needs. For a business that's growing, scaling, and offering continual updates or improvements to its automation, it’s critical that the integrating application, such as Clarity Connect, can deliver customizability on a per-job basis. A job is commonly defined as an integration task. For example, syncing accounts from FinancialForce into Magento eCommerce is a particular job, and pulling product data from FinancialForce with regards to inventory and pricing is another job. These jobs, also called tasks, can either update in real-time or near real-time within Magento eCommerce.

In order to do that effectively, it's vital that the integration platform has a scalable and robust architecture that's securely connected to the FinancialForce REST API and the Magento web API framework. This ensures that security and scalability are intact while running jobs are persistent. In many cases, it's best practice to make the tasks queue-based or have them follow some kind of persistence model that can log and report back if there are any issues. In the event of problems, the tasks should keep trying until successfully completed. It's also of importance to be able to scale and enable redundancy so that in the occurrence of a high load, excess traffic, or elevated usage, the resources can scale up in order to handle the situation. The feature of redundancy comes handy when there’s an outage, as the infrastructure can leverage backup and failover redundancies to continue processing the integrations.

Getting Started with an Intelligent System Integration

First Steps, Basic Entities, and Initial Functionality

In addition to the infrastructure and the business logic, it's definitely advised to understand your integration partner's base offering. Some of the most typical integration options that are available off-the-shelf include:

  • Customers and accounts
  • Categories
  • Products
  • Attributes and associations
  • Sales orders
  • Invoices and quotes
  • Shipments and shipment status
  • Payments
  • User locations
  • Custom entities and fields

Although these are standard out-of-the-box integration areas, it's useful to note that they should be highly customizable within any job or integration task. The rationale behind this concerns taking advantage of existing integrations that have extensive capabilities in conjunction with your integration platform and partner. It's key that they are customizable both from a data transformation and from a business logic perspective. Further attention should be paid in regard to scheduling, availability of these jobs, caching, and intelligence with the syncing tasks. This will allow syncing with the minimal amount of data that's necessary to deliver the service and support the end user is expecting.

Going deeper into the details of built-in capabilities for the FinancialForce and Magento eCommerce integration, the direction of information may be unidirectional or bidirectional. Most of the time it's going to end up being a bidirectional integration that includes addresses and contacts for the customers and accounts. Thus, the complete set of addresses on the account, billing and shipping information, or all of the contacts can be integrated. This might include detailed contact information, as well as possible associations of those contacts into a hierarchy that can be integrated into Magento eCommerce via users and their corresponding roles.

The information could be varied, as many of the customers and accounts may have specific pricing data and particular location logic. They might also have different tax levels, tax exemptions, credit limits, or the ability to purchase on account. More often than not, they've purchased products or items in the past and they already have existing invoices and sales orders that detail their purchases. In some cases, it makes a lot of sense to enable a sync from FinancialForce into Magento eCommerce so that the sales order data is updated in real-time. If there's an open invoice that needs to be paid, it can be processed within Magento eCommerce, even though it originated inside of FinancialForce. This is true for quotes as well, which can be converted into orders and paid for inside Magento.

Expanding the Integration Possibilities for Advanced Workflows

Efficiently Handle More Complex and Omnichannel Scenarios

Apart from customers and accounts, you can opt to incorporate sales orders or invoices and quotes in a bidirectional sync. Of course, a unidirectional sync from Magento to FinancialForce is always an option but the bidirectional sync supports more complicated scenarios. When a user visits the Magento eCommerce site and successfully completes a purchase, all of the order details can get pushed into FinancialForce. This can include any of the following information:

  • Order details
  • Line items
  • Addresses for shipping and billing
  • Shipping and fees
  • Taxes, tax transaction IDs, and document IDs
  • Customs and duties
  • Discounts at the item order, customer level, shipping, etc.
  • Payments, transaction information, and transaction IDs
  • Split payments and split shipments data
  • Updates from FinancialForce back to Magento eCommerce

As an item gets fulfilled, it follows the path of picking and packing, it becomes ready for shipment, then it is dispatched, and it finally receives a tracking ID. All of that information should be updated in real-time, or near real-time, from FinancialForce back to Magento eCommerce. This connection will offer the end user a self-service area where they can access and monitor the status of their order, or receive notifications and other relevant information. Moreover, the end user may need to request a replacement, product support, and even an exchange or refund. All of these behaviors would ideally be handled through self-service and be highly integrated. That's certainly something we recommend doing wherever possible and whenever applicable.

The above description summarizes the off-the-shelf capabilities of an integration between FinancialForce and Magento eCommerce. Another option is the automation of payment processing, which supports a subscription model or a membership plan. In this scenario, the recurring payment would automatically process and the transaction detail with status order information would be associated and updated inside of Magento eCommerce. You can further handle omnichannel and multi-location requirements, so that inventory and pricing information for products is dynamic and updates from FinancialForce into Magento eCommerce, enabling visibility into different locations. This would grant access to inventory levels and pricing based on location, with the ability for an end user to conduct a proximity-based search to find items imaged into eCommerce that may be in a nearby location. As a next step it could offer the transferring of items between warehouses, stores, or other locations.

One of the common areas of integration between FinancialForce and Magento eCommerce is the product catalog system. And this would typically include:

  • Catalog categories
  • Products
  • Attributes
  • Relationships and associations
  • Extended entities and fields
  • SKUs and manufacturer part numbers
  • Pricing details, customer-specific pricing, quantity-based discount rules, and general price rules
  • Discounts
  • Hierarchy information
  • Variants and kits
  • Inventory information and multi-location inventory data
  • Any kind of applicable extended fields and data

Keep in mind that additional enriched information will likely be inside of Magento eCommerce, such as details that render the pages presentable from a marketing perspective. This information must be preserved in Magento eCommerce and may not even exist in FinancialForce. Because of this, we recommend that integration tasks have the adequate intelligence and capability to understand and only update the necessary fields inside of Magento eCommerce. For example, if you want to keep the pricing and inventory data updated from FinancialForce into Magento eCommerce, to perform that without overriding the extended product data, SEO information, metadata, and media like images or videos. That embellished information must be preserved whenever you're making any updates from FinancialForce to that existing item inside of Magento eCommerce.

How Clarity can Help

Magento eCommerce and FinancialForce Integration Experts

Needless to say, our team of friendly and knowledgeable experts will certainly be happy to assist with your upcoming Magento eCommerce integration to FinancialForce. You're always welcome to click on any links on our website that might be helpful with various aspects of your desired integration project. In case you can’t locate the exact information you need, go ahead and click on the Ask the Expert link. One of our integration experts will swiftly provide a complimentary and detailed reply to every question you may have. We remain at your disposal and would be happy to help with explaining any topic of interest in relation to your integration of Magento eCommerce to FinancialForce.