Magento and Sage 300 Integration

Clarity Connect Provides the API Endpoints to Integrate Magento with any Front or Back-office System
Connecting your Magento eCommerce to Sage 300 Management Software

Uncover the Benefits for your Business and Optimize Operations

Sage 300 integration to Magento eCommerce is a very challenging but rewarding process to complete, offering advanced capabilities that include REST endpoints and an SDK library. As a rule of thumb, the SDK library is generally considered a best practice to utilize along with the REST endpoints. The Magento platform offers a web API framework that is standard to use with a REST-based protocol but can also be set up to use SOAP if required. In turn, the Sage 300 integration itself offers the ability to integrate with all entities within the system in any field that would be needed, including core and custom fields that are created within those entities. To begin with, the chosen entities might be standard categories and products, like a product catalog and all the associated data. Sage 300 has the core set of information for this product catalog, which can be pumped into the Magento eCommerce platform through an integration.

The Sage 300 side of things normally includes additional entities that may be integrated, such as:

  • Product SKUs
  • Pricing information and customer-specific pricing
  • Inventory data and location-specific inventory
  • Data for warehouses, distribution centers, or storefronts.
  • Information around categories, product relations, and advanced attribute data
  • Meta information and imagery
  • Custom fields with advanced product data

All of the above information is available to expose and integrate into Magento from Sage 300, using the Clarity Connect platform. One of the benefits a highly capable connector presents is how it can leverage task-based discrete tasks that are essentially focused on specific integration types within. For example, it can leverage advanced business logic when integrating product data from Sage 300 to Magento, so it can determine if a product is already in Magento and only certain fields should be updated. This intelligent functionality is commonly referred to as business logic and data transformation.

Examine Different Scenarios that Make Sense for your Business

Considerations for a Tailored and Fruitful Integration

Whenever a product gets updated in Sage 300, you probably want to make sure that the inventory, pricing, and maybe other information that's critical to the business goes into Magento. But you most likely wouldn’t want to override the overall product information in Magento, because your marketing team members may have carefully enriched or enhanced the product metadata. What you really need is an advanced queue-based persistent task engine that allows for systematic business logic and data transformation capabilities, with respect to each task or area of integration. One of the other core entities that we usually recommend integrating between systems is to have customers and accounts go two ways. This can typically include pulling core records from Sage 300 into Magento and whenever new customers or accounts are created, they go from Magento into Sage 300.

The fundamental need for certain business logic is apparent, to ensure that information isn’t needlessly duplicated and replicated. In this manner, it's also critical to handle user associations properly, so that when a new user gets created in Magento but already exists inside of Sage 300, the correct user association occurs. With a customer and account integration, we're inevitably looking at core customer data, address information (billing, shipping, and primary), as well as contacts. There might be a single contact or hundreds -even thousands- of contacts that have relevant pricing information that is specific to the account.

Other information that can be integrated among systems includes tax levels and different locations. Regarding locations, the associated business logic per each distinct location may also be incorporated, namely: pricing, credit limits by location, a tax exemption status, and past order history (which could drive available replacement parts). The higher idea essentially involves a general two-way integration and syncing for customers and accounts. In practice, whenever a new Magento user is created the information gets pumped into Sage 300, where it searches for an associated account. This process is possibly based on the domain name, address information, phone number, or other verification rules, to perform the association and link back to the Sage 300 account.

Scaling and Customization is Integral to Success

Applying the Ideal Supporting Business Logic

In many cases, the Magento user might already know a company account number, or some other form of reference number, as it's quite possible your organization has a really specific logic in place. Taking this into consideration, we would certainly recommend using a connector and integration platform between Magento and Sage 300 that allows you to customize and meet your business needs for how this integration is going to materialize. In addition, sales orders, invoices, and quotes are, more often than not, a core integration from Magento to Sage 300. Therefore, when someone places an order in Magento eCommerce, that order must integrate to Sage 300 as well. The following information showcases an example of a standard attainable scenario and includes things like:

  • Complete order information
  • Line items, the details of those line items, possible discounts, and the overall order itself
  • Taxes and tax classes on products
  • Data associated with document numbers (for Avalara, TaxJar, etc.)
  • Shipments, related fee calculations, and shipping discounts
  • Customs and duties
  • Payment and transaction data, including the actual transaction, profile information, split payments, and refunds

Virtually anything that's associated with a particular order can be pulled from Magento into Sage 300. Even previous invoices inside Sage 300 can be transferred to Magento and be paid within it. The same applies to Sage 300 quotes, as they can be converted into a Magento order that the user is able to pay for right there. All of the above capabilities are possible with a flawless integration between Magento eCommerce and Sage 300. We absolutely encourage you to evaluate and look for a connector or integration platform between Magento and Sage 300 that effectively allows you to grow your business.

Your solution of choice should ideally empower you to scale and modify the capabilities from a task -or discreet kind of integration- perspective, so that you can integrate products and categories separately or together as you please. By extension, you should be able to integrate accounts and addresses separately or together if you’d like, and then track the status of these as they're completing the integration process. We typically recommend an enterprise-level, scalable, and redundant system that is queue-based with persistence. In other words, whenever a task is queued up but one system is offline (be it Magento, Sage 300, or an intermediary system), the integration is going to continue to be persistent until it completes and provides some form of status update. Lastly, it’s viewed as best practice to have a dashboard and notification system as well, which is something that we offer as part of the solution with the Clarity Connect platform.