Magento and Sage 100 Integration

An advanced Magento eCommerce integration to Sage 100 allows a profoundly robust scalability for businesses looking to enhance their capabilities or extend their reach, without necessarily adding to the overhead of the business. It also comes with the ability of an optimized reduction regarding the required spend to scale and expand within a particular market or multiple markets. Sage 100 is a highly capable system, as it offers multiple different forms of integrations. Depending on the desired depth of integration into Magento, we recommend that you work with a partner that has equivalent experience with the capabilities and the available offerings within Sage 100. The preferred execution method is through the Business Object Interface, commonly referred to with the acronym BOI. The BOI essentially grants full access to an SDK-like interaction between Sage 100 and Magento, using the latter’s web API framework.

The protocol that's typically used for the Sage 100 BOI ends up being a web services/SDK type of interface, and the Magento APIs are going to be REST-based calls. The Sage 100 also offers a Visual Integrator (VI) and a relatively limited set of web services. It’s useful to know that the Sage 100 platform itself does have options for licensing that may or may not be enabled. Depending on which interface or integration type you wish to complete with Sage, we encourage you to examine your licensing and make sure that it’s appropriate. If you don’t already have the desired Sage 100 license, you should be aware of the associated cost for obtaining and turning it on.

Our ultimate recommendation is to select either the Business Object Interface or the Visual Integrator for your Magento integration. The reasoning behind this advice is how the web services are quite limited in terms of available entities. If your particular scenario just needs to integrate sales orders, contacts, and perhaps other simple entities similar to those, it may be possible to only use the web services that are already built into Sage 100. On a number of occasions though, businesses will opt to use the Visual Integrator along with the Business Object Interface. While the Business Object Interface tends to be relatively complex at first, it reliably delivers the most powerful capabilities overall, with a strong ability to access any entity or field within the system. It should be noted that Visual Integrator technically has these options too, but it can be cumbersome and rather finicky to work with just because it's using comparably older technology. On top of this, there are some nuances to how VI needs to be configured in order to run successfully.

Syncing Considerations and Optimal Execution

Due to the complexity the VI or BOI may present, we recommend working with a partner who is experienced with Sage 100 and is able to expertly navigate these different scenarios or alternative options. With regards to the actual Sage 100 and Magento eCommerce integration itself, we usually recommend evaluating many distinct entities within your business for optimization and automation. Probably the most common entities tend to be the following:

• Categories
• Products
• Product catalog system, the associated attributes, and any relationships between the products
• Pricing information and possibly customer specific pricing
• Inventory
• Locations
• Meta information
• Imagery
• Custom fields

Any of the above data that's living in Sage 100 can be brought into Magento via a successful integration. It is even possible to extend or hydrate that data further inside of Magento, by intelligently evaluating when certain fields are updated in Sage 100 to pull those into Magento in a logical and reasonable way that works for your business. This is generally referred to as business logic and data transformation within the connector itself.

The Clarity Connect platform certainly enables these capabilities for your business, and it doesn’t stop here as we can additionally handle other integration types. For example, customers and accounts may be synced between Sage 100 and Magento in a two-way sync. In other words, existing customers and accounts can be brought over into Magento so that the accounts can be claimed inside it. This can be done based on the domain of the email address and other forms of verification, like claiming an account with an account administrator or administrators. The process can be completely customized in practice, to match your unique business needs and requirements.

In addition, clients often decide to bring in detailed information around accounts and related hierarchy, such as:

• Addresses, including billing and shipping addresses
• Contacts
• Account specific pricing
• Tax levels and tax exemptions
• Location data
• Credit limits on the accounts and their updates
• Product purchasing history

Other potential data that might be brought inside Magento involves recommendations, which may be in the form of transactional emails with included recommendations. It's also possible to bring over sales orders, invoices, and quotes from Sage 100 into Magento or vice-versa. All of these cases present the ability to bring back customers and accounts from Magento into Sage 100 as well.

For certain entities, including sales orders, invoices, and quotes, it's achievable to bring a line item and details from Magento into Sage 100 whenever someone completes the checkout process. This is going to include taxes and tax classes on each of the product line items, if desired, along with any kind of integrations like Avalara. Further options would be shipping and fees, customs and duties, discounts, any item orders, shipping level discounts, payments, and tracking of transaction data. Therefore, you can split payments and integrate refund data as well, so that the request for a refund can be made in Magento, then sent to Sage 100 for processing, and return to Magento. In a similar fashion, any shipments and their status can go from Magento into Sage 100 for fulfillment and shipment with tracking information. Next, the Sage 100 system can dynamically push the data into Magento using the connector application, allowing the end customer to see real time -or near real time- data with tracking and information about their shipment status.

Moreover, you have the option to enable payments from invoices, quotes, or orders that are placed in Sage 100 and Magento has no prior related information. By syncing those entities, customers are empowered to make payments for a Sage 100 invoice inside of Magento. In addition, you may select to set up users syncing from Magento to Sage 100, and even allow for specific logic that associates the created account with a particular company. As seen before, this can be verified based on domain information or possibly company addresses.

Furthermore, the functionality supports omni-channel capabilities, like multiple locations, proximity searching, transferring of inventory, inventory location based on nearby stores, and more. Through Clarity Connect, it's feasible to essentially integrate in a one-way or two-way direction between Magento eCommerce and Sage 100 systems, with advanced data transformation and business logic. One of the big advances that the Clarity Connect platform offers is a very discreet task-based engine. This connection tool allows for queue-based persistent tasks that are associated with specific entities and fields that you need to integrate data between. This includes the ability to leverage specific company and business logic together with data transformations on core and custom entities. Clarity also offers real-time integrations to meet elevated needs with the highest level of accuracy.

Experienced Magento to Sage 100 Integration Specialists

If you have questions about either aspect of this integration, we definitely recommend that you reach out to our team of experienced professionals who'd be happy to share more. We certainly encourage you to ask our friendly and knowledgeable staff about any of the aforementioned options to receive all the details you need. You're also welcome to look around our website and discover the other available resources which provide additional related information. If you still have areas of a particular topic that aren’t fully covered on our site, click the Ask the Expert link. We'll be happy to provide you with a complimentary response and elaborate further on that subject. Always feel free to contact our team of specialists and learn everything your business needs for a flawless Magento to Sage 100 integration.

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