ASPDotNetStorefront eCommerce to Sage 300 Integration

A Sage 300 integration with AspDotNetStorefront eCommerce empowers your business to personalize and individualize the end user experience. The integration can simultaneously reduce the overhead per transaction and improve the overall margin for the business while promoting an optimal customer experience. It's important to select the right team to complete your integration between AspDotNetStorefront and Sage 300 in order to maximize the benefits. Our recommendation is to consider three key components when evaluating potential partners for your upcoming integration project: relevant experience, technical know-how, and the built-in functionality of the proposed solution. The first criterion is about selecting a team that has the necessary experience and depth of knowledge to properly analyze your business processes. They should be able to identify the areas that will benefit from industry best practices with regards to self-service portals and uni-directional or bi-directional data syncs.

Your team of choice should understand what fields or components of data and business processes will most likely make sense for your business in both the short and long term. This is a critical step for the integration, as the planning and discovery process really sets the direction and trajectory for the success of your AspDotNetStorefront integration to Sage 300.

From a technological perspective, we also recommend selecting a team that brings to bear the capability to complete the integration optimally. The Sage 300 platform has a very robust set of APIs through their REST API endpoints, as well as a Software Development Kit (SDK) that can enable interaction with AspDotNetStorefront eCommerce. On the other side, AspDotNetStorefront leverages the Web Service Interface (WSI) as its own API endpoints. It's fundamentally important to consider and ideally utilize these endpoints because the best practice with Sage 300 and AspDotNetStorefront is to continually upgrade and update the software for security and feature improvements.

Whenever an integration is completed directly against the database, or generally just not using the API endpoints properly, this practice can create a lot of additional incremental costs with any future upgrades. In this scenario, when the time comes to upgrade your Sage 300 instance, the integration may have to be upgraded too by completing a very significant amount of related work so it can continue working. For this reason, we highly recommend a collaboration with a partner who has the technical competency with Sage 300 endpoints as well as AspDotNetStorefront API endpoints. This will ensure the integration will remain functional through future upgrades and will effectively prevent the need for additional rework. Finally, we advise working with a partner who has a significant amount of capability off-the-shelf so you can immediately benefit from a wide array of integration functions.

Core Features of a Powerful Integrator System

The aforementioned rich set of starting functionality typically includes several useful components. Apart from leveraging a platform with readily available turnkey capabilities, it should be noted that various aspects can be further customized and catered to your business needs. In addition, it's really important that the platform itself can utilize endpoint customizability, scalability, very specific high fidelity business workflows, as well as data transformations, security, and overall redundancy. All in all, the key component of the turnkey solution is that it has to be flexible, adjustable, and essentially malleable enough from an architecture perspective. This will offer the required assurance that the system can achieve the business objectives in the long run, while providing a relatively low-cost short-term solution that's available fairly quickly.

It can be a challenging endeavor from a software perspective and we certainly believe that our Clarity Connect platform excels in this department. For an AspDotNetStorefront eCommerce integration to Sage 300, some of the areas that should be available off-the-shelf are customers and accounts. This would include addresses, like shipping and billing addresses, and contacts that might be accompanied by a hierarchy. The contact records may be synced bi-directionally but if not, they'll surely sync from Sage 300 into AspDotNetStorefront eCommerce.

Since users and contacts will integrate, some logic is needed to verify that the contact or user doesn't already exist in either one of the systems. There could be certain logic around tying a user or a contact to an account, so that the account can then get access to specific pricing logic or other components that are relevant to that particular account. In addition to addresses and contacts, we also typically want to bring in the following complementary information:

• Pricing data, like customer-specific pricing, quantity price breaks, pricing rules, and price levels
• Credit limits, the ability to purchase on account and different limits per location
• Taxes, tax exemption status, tax levels, and tax documentation
• Historical purchases with invoices and quotes that are associated with the customer account record

The above present a few example entities that we might want to bring in and are very common to include in the integration. They are the standard entities that should be available out-of-the-box with your upcoming integration between AspDotNetStorefront and Sage 300. As with any business, you'll probably require specific customizations or possibly locate areas that aren't needed and will be turned off in the beginning.

Self-Service Options and the Value of Bi-Directional Syncing

In addition to customers and accounts, we also recommend incorporating sales orders, invoices, and quotes as they pertain to the business. This would typically be a bi-directional sync, sending invoices and quotes from Sage 300 into AspDotNetStorefront and then allowing the end user to receive notifications from their dashboard. So a payment could be completed inside AspDotNetStorefront even though the invoice originated in Sage 300, or a Sage 300 quote may be converted into a sales order in AspDotNetStorefront. After the process is complete in AspDotNetStorefront, the information of a new payment or sales order will go back to Sage 300 through the integration. The sales order could include the following:

• Line items on the sales order
• Sales order details with specific calculations
• Tax information
• Shipping and fees
• Customs and duties
• Discounts
• Payment and transaction data
• Split shipments or split payments

Once the order goes from AspDotNetStorefront eCommerce to Sage 300, the fulfillment data and order status can be tracked. As the order begins fulfillment, it goes through a picking and packing stage, becomes ready for shipping, gets dispatched, receives a tracking ID, and is finally delivered. All of those steps can be synced from Sage 300 into AspDotNetStorefront for users to access and trace their orders on their own.

From their AspDotNetStorefront dashboard, users can also request a refund, a replacement, or just generally request customer support and provide a review. That data can be synced from AspDotNetStorefront eCommerce back into Sage 300 in a manner that makes the most sense for your business. The usual scenario would be a bi-directional sync for sales orders, invoices, and quotes. Additional information may contain:

• Categories and products
• Catalog data, such as attributes, product associations, and product relationships
• Advanced meta information
• Variants or kits

The above data could also be included in the catalog sync or the categories and products. These could be accompanied by base-level information from Sage 300, such as:

• SKUs and manufacturer part numbers
• Available description data
• Inventory, including different locations and their granular inventory data
• Interrogate kits for inventory that can be broken out of a kit
• Pricing that's different per location or pricing, quantity-based price breaks, and customer-specific pricing levels

AspDotNetStorefront is expected to have extended meta information and enriched site content that differs from Sage 300. We encourage you to look for a partner like Clarity who can provide business logic that preserves extended meta information inside of AspDotNetStorefront, while still enabling a robust and performant sync on the pricing and inventory data for products that are already inside of AspDotNetStorefront. Finally, it's also very common to sync user data, location data, and custom entities or fields between Sage 300 and AspDotNetStorefront eCommerce. These are all capabilities for which Clarity can enable a specific sync to run on AspDotNetStorefront and Sage 300, in accordance with your business needs.

AspDotNetStorefront to Sage 300 Integration Experts

You're welcome to reach out to our team of friendly and knowledgeable experts for a complimentary needs analysis and review of any upcoming integration work for Sage 300 and AspDotNetStorefront eCommerce. Feel free to click on any of the links you see on our site and read related resources that might be helpful for your project. If you have any questions or topics that aren’t fully covered here and you'd like to discuss in detail with our team, click on the Ask the Expert link. Our specialists will be happy to provide you with a fast response that elaborates on all the areas of interest for your AspDotNetStorefront eCommerce to Sage 300 integration.

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