Fishbowl ecommerce integration

Automating real-time inventory management for front to back office
Clarity Connect integration with Fishbowl

Fishbowl ecommerce integration

Fishbowl Inventory is one of the most popular inventory management solutions on the market. It also acts as a great standalone tool for busineses that need to track their assets. It is common for companies to establish an internal ERP system to organize business data. Fishbowl has dozens of advanced features to help your business manage inventory more smoothly while eliminating inefficiency and unnecessary expenses. Integrating Fishbowl Inventory with Clarity Connect can maximize your efficiences, processes, and profits. Many small and medium-sized busineses are looking for smarter ways to operate in order to survive in this changing economy. Order management, inventory control, warehouse management, and manufacturing are all silos of your organizations that must communicate with one another.

Fishbowl API integration by Clarity Ventures

The cost of purchasing and/or creating the tangible product to sell is often a company's largest expense. Clarity can help your team identify available inventory, and ensure you stay cash-flow positive. Product line constraints, needless tie ups, and slow processes are a thing of the past when combinging the power of Fishbowl Invetory and Connect. The ability to track and report on inventory in multiple locations, single data entry point for multiple systems, insightful reports, and creating pricing rules are all features to help manage your ordering process. In addition to pulling information from the ERP platform, Clarity specializes in securely pushing customer transactions such as orders and payments, quote requests, and account contact information updates from the public facing storefront to a SSL secured internal ERP system. Custom Pricing, Costing Methods, Reconciling, and landed costs are all aspects provided by Fishbowl Inventory to help move your business forward. Below, we list steps and considerations for integrating Fishbowl and Clarity Connect.

Inventory Automation & Efficiency

What Does the Fishbowl integration Provide?

When organizations assess the benefits of an ERP integration to their ecommerce website, there are several key factors to consider. Below, is an outline of recommended considerations and steps to complete:

Security

TThis is always a major concern for two-way integrations. ecommerce platforms and public facing storefronts typically have complex security constraints. Clarity has developed a middle ware layer called Clarity Connect that allows customers to securely push data to the Clarity Connect middleware that interfaces with Fishbowl APIs. This allows data to go past the company firewalls, and isolate the data that needs to be sent and received from the public facing storefront. Clarity connect dramatically reduces the surface area for a potential security issue and creates an intermediate clearinghouse confirming data is securely pushed and pulled between the internal ERP platform and the external ecommerce storefront.

Performance

Fishbowl instances are usually secure and housed in a different physical location than the public facing website. Without a middle ware layer, this would potentially cause major lags in data load times and other performance metrics. Clarity Connect enables a rapid load time and intelligent refreshing of the externally facing data to reflect internal updates in real time. By effectively pushing updates on a real-time basis, details that would otherwise take minutes to load on the site now load within milliseconds as they're cached on the external interface. In addition, specific customer data that needs to be pulled from the ERP system in real-time is pulled in dynamically using AJAX loading techniques to dramatically improve performance.

integrations to Line of Business Applications

Most mid to large sized businesses integrate several, if not dozens, of LOB applications to streamline their workflows and get the data where it needs to be. Some clients prefer a simple web interface for their sales team, such as a CRM or custom sales tool. This allows sales team members to focus just on their quotes and orders.

In addition to Enterprise Quickbooks, Clarity offers full customization capabilities to tightly integrate other LOB applications such as order fulfillment tools, support and ticketing tools, CRM and service tools, email and newsletter/marketing applications, etc. Imagine the sales insight your team would have if they were notified if a client hadn't logged in for more than 90 days, if another client was purchasing 150% more than their normal monthly purchases, and hundreds of other scenarios.

Oracle ecommerce integration image

Shipping & Freight

Due to the nature of Clarity's past projects we have extensive experience with not just the standard UPS, USPS, FedEx, DHL and other standard carrier integrations for shipping costs and package tracking and returns but we also specialize in helping setup and configure the pick list and label printing, scanning and implementation of the physical packing stations and picking process to improve internal workflows as well. In addition to being able to provide support for the actual order management and processing of orders for different carriers we also specialize in working with freight carriers to automate the quotes, pricing, bill of lading setup and processing, obtaining customer specific pricing, and dynamically providing freight shipment status as well.

Taxes, Customs and Duties

Many companies operate abroad, but few currently operate with fully automated processes for their international transactions. Clarity delivers in domestic taxes and integration with internal ERP tax tables, custom tax tables, and setting up external API integration but also offers extensive specialization in international taxes, customs and duties as well. Specifically, Clarity delivers customs and duties integration to dynamically pull this information from the ERP platform or enable third party integration for this component as well to pull the most up to date customs and duties data in real-time for global payments and ordering.

Quotes and Workflows

In addition to managing and placing orders, many business find their processes run smoothest with a streamlined human interaction to facilitate the process. This can apply for all orders or orders within a certain segment of business. In either case, Clarity Connect is able to pull in the Fishbowl sales order documents and help streamline the quoting workflow. In addition to helping with notification e-mails and embedding quotes, Clarity's Fishbowl Sales Documents integration directly pulls quote status and allows the ERP system to trigger workflow steps. This reduces the chances of human error. Alternatively, some clients prefer a simple web interface for their sales team. This allows sales team members to focus just on their quotes and orders, instead of logging into the ERP system to manage this data. Connect’s middle ware tool updates your ERP system seamlessly.

Clarity Connect Can Help

Clarity and Fishbowl integration

As a final consideration, we highly recommend a full internal audit of the prioritized list of requirements as well as an external review by an expert, like Clarity. This is vital to ensure your desired outcome. In addition, it's critical to establish timeline criteria if there are hard deadlines. Setting clear objectives for prioritized deliverables with clear contingency plans will help smooth the process significantly.

Fishbowl integration has the ability to boost your ERP and ecommerce operations to new heights. Clarity is an expert in helping deploy over 1,300 successful projects, and optimizing clients’ processes.