Steps To Be Followed To Integrate
Shopify And SAP Successfully

While many business owners choose SAP as their preferred ERP system, just a small percentage of them choose Shopify as their storefront. Shopify is one of the simplest plugins to install and run on a website, and many hosting companies already offer a variety of tools for setting up and managing a Shopify installation. The most unexpected aspect is that, despite being one of the easiest webshops to integrate with SAP, businesses who use SAP to simplify things choose to avoid Shopify. A business’s growth will be aided by seamless communication between SAP and Shopify.

Here are six must-dos for a successful Shopify SAP integration

#1 Carefully Record Your Critical SAP And Shopify Connections.

Take the time to write down and explain the business rules that govern order flow, fulfillment, customer account management, and inventory control. Determine which business rules rely on SAP and Shopify communication, as well as the communication frequency, cadence, and load, and mark unidirectional and bidirectional communications. Break them down into events, triggers, conditions, and actions to create comprehensive workflow scenarios.

For instance, a company rule may stipulate that if a client purchases two of the same product, the second is free. Event: Order is created > Condition: Order contains 2 of X > Action: a discount of X amount is applied.

This task will take time, but if you don’t do it, you’ll be buried by issues that arise during quality assurance testing, user acceptability testing, and post-launch.

#2 Think About Utilising A Connecting App

You’ll be in a fantastic position to decide whether a connector app makes sense after mapping touchpoints. A connector app is a Shopify plugin that employs a hosted service to function as a bridge to allow data to flow between your shop and store backend.

The biggest advantage of this approach is that you won’t have to spend a lot of time and money creating and maintaining a bespoke integration. In a digital commerce project, the maintenance expense is frequently where the biggest technical debt develops over time.

In every project, it’s critical to evaluate if a pre-built connection can be used and, if not, to gain buy-in from the whole team on the additional work that will be required to make a bespoke method effective.

#3 Before You Commit To Bespoke Development Work, Learn About The Shopify API’s Capabilities And Limits

Shopify’s API is comprehensive, allowing for a wide range of feature expansions and custom integrations. An ERP integration project, on the other hand, will test any API due to the centrality and criticality of the data involved (inventory, pricing, promotion, and so on).

Validate that your data timeliness and flow requirements are compatible with those restrictions before settling on a bespoke method. In Shopify SAP Business One integration, the API call ceiling, for example, might be a factor. Given the rising popularity of Shopify, this is an important consideration for all users.

#4 Make A Security Evaluation And A Security Plan

You must record the flow and status of all data across the whole integration funnel since

Shopify SAP B1 integration

includes many systems (Shopify, the ERP, and maybe a middleware or ETL layer). Ensure that data is encrypted both in transit and at rest, that your logs are maintained securely, and that log data does not include sensitive information.

Also, be aware of “data refuse”: consider temporary file storage and data transience to ensure that sensitive data isn’t left unprotected and forgotten.

#5 Weighing Your Priorities

Delivering various projects for our clients over many years has taught us that successful projects have certain similar characteristics. The willingness to make excellent compromises is one of the most important of those shared qualities.

Since ERP integrations rely on many systems’ interaction touchpoints and frequently include specific business needs, a willingness to accept compromises along the way will be critical to success. There will be unknowns, and good decisions will need to be taken along the road to get to the finish line, always keeping the final objective in mind.

#6 Have A Well-Thought-Out Quality Assurance Strategy

It should go without saying that you’ll need a robust plan for assuring data quality not just during the initial data populating of customer and order records but also throughout the continuous data flow across systems when orders and customer modifications occur.

However, the most significant distinction in QA testing your Shopify and SAP interfaces is the amount of data involved in ERP integrations in general. Large datasets, unlike relational databases, demand you to think and prepare on a bigger scale. You should focus on evaluating all of the different data clusters (a grouping of data that is comparable, such as all customer records that have made 5+ orders or all customers outside the US) rather than testing individual records. Spend time determining the data’s three Vs: volume, variety, and velocity.

Finally, because timeliness is so important (consider inventory and out-of-stock situations), a good QA strategy should incorporate a range of performance tests.

Wrap Up

The advantages that this integration provides to a company can benefit the company’s consumers and, by extension, the company itself. A fully connected Shopify SAP integration system reduces data transfer mistakes – data sent to the online storefront and returned to the database can be deemed dependable because a human error in the entry is eliminated. SAP’s ability to handle automatic order updates to clients guarantees that consumers are always up to date on the whereabouts of their products. We hope that this article helps you understand your role during the Shopify SAP integration process.