The client sells industrial products and uses Epicor’s P21 as their ERP system. They wanted to start selling their products on the web, while making it easy to keep the inventory and orders in sync.
Challenge
There are over 10,000 active products in P21’s inventory, with many products appearing in multiple categories. The primary objectives were:
1. Push product catalog from P21 to WooCommerce automatically on a schedule, including product images and PDF spec sheets.
2. Accurately calculate shipping costs
3. Allow customers to pay instantly, and send customer and order data back to P21 for fulfillment.
Solution
On the P21 server, a custom SSIS (SQL Server Integration Package) was created to extract and transform the inventory data. The exported data is then securely transferred to the WordPress server, where a nightly cron job loads it into the WooCommerce database.
Just prior to the automated WooCommerce product import, a custom Windows utility collects the product images and PDF spec sheets on the P21 server, and also transfers it to the WordPress server, so that product’s images and spec sheets can be updated during the import process.
To send WooCommerce orders back to P21, we leverage the WooCommerce API by sending order data to a custom endpoint. This endpoing parses the WooCommerce data, and batch imports orders into P21.
Benefits
The process of updating WooCommerce’s product database and sending orders to P21 is completely automated, allowing staff to focus on fulfillment and customer support.
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