How to Connect Your ERP to Your Online Store

Your ERP is the system your company actually runs on: stock, prices, orders, invoices, suppliers. Your online store is a second place where all of those exist. Keeping them in agreement by hand is a job that grows exactly as fast as your sales do.

Connecting them is €390 for a standard ERP connection, or from €500 for a custom API connection where the system has no ready integration. The cost is rarely the difficult part. The decisions are.

Decide which system is the master

For each piece of information, exactly one system is the truth and the other follows. Getting this wrong is what makes integrations fight each other.

Typical, and usually right:

• Products and prices — ERP is master, store follows.
• Stock — ERP is master, store follows.
• Orders — store is master, ERP receives.
• Invoices — ERP is master, store displays.
• Customers — depends on your business; decide explicitly.

Write this table down before any technical conversation. It is the specification.

Decide how often

Not everything needs to be instant.

• Stock usually needs to be quick — minutes, not hours — because selling what you do not have is expensive.
• Prices can often run nightly.
• Orders should be immediate.
• Product changes can be scheduled.

Real-time everything is more expensive to build and more fragile to run. Match the frequency to the cost of being wrong.

Decide what happens when it fails

It will fail sometimes. The connection drops, the ERP is down for maintenance, a product has a field the store cannot accept.

Before building, answer:

• Does the failed item retry, and how often?
• Who is told, and how? (Automatic notifications — €190.)
• Can a person complete the step manually in the meantime?

An integration without this is not finished, however well it works on a good day.

Expect the data to need cleaning

The most common surprise in an ERP project is not technical. It is that the product data in the ERP was never meant to be shown to customers: internal codes as names, missing measurements, three different ways of writing the same brand.

Budget for that. Bulk product import is from €150, and customer database cleanup from €190 — and in a first integration one of those is usually needed.

What the result looks like

When it is done properly:

• Products and prices appear online from one place.
• Stock is one number, visible to everyone who needs it.
• Orders arrive in the ERP without being typed.
• Invoices are generated and sent automatically (invoice automation — €290).
• Nobody reconciles two systems by hand at month end.

Start with one flow

If this feels large, it is because doing all of it at once is large. Start with stock in one direction. Prove it works for two weeks. Then add orders. Then invoices.

Each step is useful on its own, and each one that works makes the next one easier to justify.