How ecommerce integrations work

How integrations work

• How an integration works

  How data moves between your store and back office: matching, checks, approvals, queues and monitoring, with a worked example of one sync run.

• Preparing your store for an ERP integration

  The fields, shared API limits and responsibilities to agree before connecting a store to an ERP. A practical guide for webshop agencies.

Fundamentals

• Integrating a system without an API

  No API in your ERP, accounting package or supplier portal? Four routes to integrate it: SOAP, a database view, a file export and a script, with their failures.

• Real time or batch

  Real time or batch, per data stream: what has to move in seconds, what waits for a nightly run, what polling costs in API calls, and how lags add up.

• Unified commerce vs omnichannel

  Multichannel, omnichannel and unified commerce compared on stock, orders and returns, with Shopify POS locations, inventory states and the ERP integration.

• Webhooks are not a guarantee

  Webhooks arrive at least once, out of order and sometimes never. The retry rules of Shopify, BigCommerce, WooCommerce and Business Central, and what to build.

• What is iPaaS?

  What an iPaaS is, how a flow runs step by step, how platforms meter usage, and which API limits stay the same on any platform, with worked numbers.

• What not to sync

  What to leave out of a store to ERP integration: inactive items, historical orders, calculated values, card data and store content, with the limits.

Field mapping

• Address field mapping

  How an address moves from Shopify to NetSuite and a UPS label: address lines, state codes, ZIP+4, country codes and the field lengths that truncate.

• Dates and time zones

  Why orders land on the wrong day: UTC against local time, daylight saving, MM/DD against DD/MM, Excel week numbers and lead times in business days.

• Duplicate customers and orders

  Where duplicate customers and duplicate orders come from in a store to ERP integration, and how a fixed matching order and external IDs prevent them.

• Money, tax and rounding

  Why store and ERP totals differ by a cent: cents against decimals, sales tax calculated twice, rounding per line, discounts, exemptions and currency.

• Order status mapping

  Shopify, NetSuite and carrier statuses side by side, which ones create or update an ERP order, partial shipments, and orders cancelled during a sync.

• Required fields the source never sends

  Subsidiary, department, class, location, discount items and posting groups: why NetSuite and Business Central require them and how an integration fills them.

• SKU, UPC and GTIN

  SKU, UPC, EAN and GTIN-14 compared for integrations: lengths, check digits, leading zeros, case codes, and where Shopify and NetSuite store each.

• Supplier CSV and Excel files

  Leading zeros, UPCs in scientific notation, inch marks, Windows-1252, renamed columns and half-written files: what breaks supplier feeds and the check for each.

• Units of measure

  Base unit, sale unit and conversion rate in Shopify, NetSuite and Business Central, with the unit codes X12, cXML and OCI accept and a worked example.

• What is field mapping?

  Field mapping explained with one Shopify order mapped into NetSuite: copy, transform, look up, required fields and the nine classes of mismatch.

• Which stock counts

  On hand, available, committed and incoming: which number belongs in the store and what Shopify, NetSuite and Business Central call each one.

Limits and throughput

• API throttling and backoff

  What a throttled API call looks like on Shopify, NetSuite, Business Central and BigCommerce, which failures to retry, and how backoff and pacing work.

• Integration throughput

  Work out how long a full sync takes: records times calls per record over the rate limit, with sums for polling cycles, daily caps and a peak hour.

• NetSuite concurrency and governance limits

  NetSuite concurrency limits per service tier, governance units per script type and per call, the error codes, and a worked sum for an order sync.

• Shopify API rate limits

  Shopify API rate limits per plan in numbers: GraphQL cost points, REST bucket sizes, bulk operations, and the sum for a stock sync of 50,000 variants.

Operations

• Replacing an integration

  Replace an integration or an old script: a parallel run with writes disabled, a diff per order, cutover per stream, an order-number boundary, a rollback rule.

• What happens when a sync fails

  What happens to orders, stock and messages when an integration fails: queue, retries with backoff, dead-letter queue, conflicts and how you find out.

PunchOut

• CIF catalog

  The CIF catalog format: header keys, the 12 fixed fields and their limits, quoting rules, full and incremental loads, a PunchOut index and validation.

• cXML vs OCI

  cXML and OCI side by side: session start, credentials, cart format and field lengths, documents after the cart, search in the procurement system, upkeep.

• PunchOutSetupRequest

  The PunchOutSetupRequest element by element: credentials, operation, BuyerCookie, BrowserFormPost, Contact, extrinsics and ItemOut, with an annotated sample.

• PunchOut vs EDI

  PunchOut and EDI compared: what each carries, cXML documents next to X12 850, 855, 856 and 810, how SAP Business Network translates, and what breaks.

• PunchOut vs hosted catalog

  PunchOut and hosted catalogs side by side: formats, file limits, buyer approval, price changes, discontinued items and what each one asks of the supplier.

AI assistants

• NetSuite with Claude

  How Claude connects to NetSuite through the AI Connector Service: setup, the 14 standard MCP tools, writes, shared concurrency, row limits and custom tools.