Shopify API for SAP Business One Items
There are many options available for integrating Shopify or other platforms with SAP Business One. And, though many such solutions tout their simplicity, system integrations must also account for the nuances of your business, for instance, how you handle tax or how you handle discounts.
The best SAP Shopify integration must handle the most common synchronization patterns out of the box while providing the flexibility to solve your unique requirements. If the tool is too rigid and offers no pre-configured setup, your cost of ownership will be higher as you’ll be paying for ground-up product customizations to synchronize SAP Business One with Shopify.
Third Wave has helped many of our customers overcome their SAP Business One integration challenges thanks to industry-leading tools that others can’t offer.
When you “open the box” of our Bizweaver application, you see pre-built integrations covering your most common needs and easy-to-use features that match your business processes. There is no need for custom software development to accomplish your integration. As your eCommerce capabilities grow and evolve with your business, the flexibility of Bizweaver adjusts your integrations along with you.
There are four essential data synchronizations shared between SAP Business One and a Shopify Store: Orders, Items, Inventory, and Deliveries.
Bizweaver’s pre-built Shopify integration for SAP Business One covers the essential data processing and connectors to both systems. It incorporates the common Business One customer needs that Third Wave has experienced in years of Shopify and other eCommerce platform integrations. Bizweaver also provides the flexibility and ease of use to modify and add to the pre-built template integrations.
This post is part three of a four-part series that gives you a deeper look at how to integrate each of these specific elements and fields in SAP Business One with your Shopify Store.
In this post we’re covering the “Items” data synchronization.
Check out the rest of the series as well, covering three other primary data synchronizations for SAP Business One and Shopify:
- Orders
- Items (this post)
- Inventory
- Deliveries
Now let’s dive in and explore SAP Business One inventory items synchronization and how this powerful prebuilt integration demonstrates Third Wave’s commitment to Connecting and Control (two of our 4 Cs).
Bizweaver: The Heart of Integration
Before we walk through exactly how to connect your SAP Business One inventory Items with Shopify, we need to talk about the tool that makes this integration sing: Bizweaver.
Bizweaver is a user-friendly yet powerful app available from Third Wave Business Systems. It’s an integration and process automation platform that bridges the gap between SAP Business One and your business’s ecosystem of third-party tools, including Shopify. It provides a crucial missing layer between Business One and other platform integrations, acting as a hub for automating transaction synchronization.
Bizweaver provides the following capabilities:
- Comprehensive and intuitive data mapping to and from SAP Business One: Bizweaver acts as a translator, mapping the appropriate data from one application to the right locations in the other, and vice versa.
- Integrate with leading digital platforms: Pre-built integrations between SAP Business One and leading eCommerce platforms, including Shopify.
- Point and click JSON building and formatting: This user-friendly method makes the creation and modification of data syncs more accessible and error free.
- Data processing via SQL, File I/O, Encryption, OAuth authentication.
- Easy workflow organization and reusability: Assemble data processing steps in the familiar flowchart metaphor. Easily copy, organize, and repurpose workflows. Export and import workflows between Bizweaver installations.
- Verify and Deploy: Multi-speed test execution with breakpoints and detailed tracing reduces time and effort from concept to deployment.
To sum up, Bizweaver enables you and your team to deploy process automation and system integrations using an intuitive low-code application, without the need for software coding skills.
It provides a way to automate data processing which can be used to further augment the capabilities of SAP Business One or integrate external systems like Shopify with SAP Business One. Anyone well-versed in your business processes and conversant in Business One can do this work. Of course, Third Wave experts back-stop BizWeaver for you too helping as needed every step of the way.
How to Synchronize SAP Business One Items to Shopify
Enough about Bizweaver itself: now we’re ready to see how the pre-built Shopify-SAP Business One Items integration works.
Let’s dive deeper into how to take Business One Items and flow them to your Shopify store. BizWeaver simplifies this otherwise complex process, allowing you to control the items and inventory information presented in your Shopify store.
Step 1: Stage Items (optional and highly recommended)
You may or may not want to stage your Items, but if you do, this is the place to start.
We’ve found staging tables to be especially successful for items integrations with SAP Business One and eCommerce providers such as Shopify because they make modifying and updating high-volume data — such as those relating to items — incredibly simple.
Staging tables effectively decouple Shopify from SAP Business One so that neither system is directly connected to or affected by the other. Staging tables provide a mid-point for data to and from the systems where it can be reviewed, updated, and corrected if needed.
Step 2: Load and Sync Items to Your Shopify Store
The pre-built integration automates the setup of User-Defined Fields (UDFs) in SAP Business One used to synchronize Shopify and SAP data related to items. Among these are fields to designate which items in SAP Business One you’d like to appear in Shopify. Bizweaver then posts the item information to Shopify via the Shopify API.
The solution also automatically creates another UDF in Business One indicating that an item has been staged, thereby ensuring data integrity. Though staging tables are an optional approach included with the pre-built integration, we highly recommend this Shopify-SAP Business One decoupling as it significantly simplifies the amount of customization required for the actual data processing in Shopify or SAP Business One.
Once again, the solution adds any relevant items data you specify to the Shopify store via the Shopify API, and retrieves store location data from Shopify to use with future item updates. This data is also saved to the SAP Business One UDFs automatically created by the solution at setup. Any item data update failures on Shopify also trigger email notifications to the appropriate internal stakeholders.
Step 3: Manage and Modify Items via Versago
One of the beauties of having data in staging tables is that it may then be made available, securely, via a web page for users to view and change! Introducing Versago, Third Wave’s no-code web solution designer. Included with the pre-built Shopify-SAP Business One integration is a 2-user license to Versago including pre-configured web pages for viewing and updating data in the integration staging tables.
Launching Versago and navigating to the eCommerce Items shows you everything you need to see from both SAP Business One and Shopify: all items staged to go up to Shopify with the ability to edit quantities, price, and other product information for presentation.
Bizweaver (+ Versago) for SAP Business One + Shopify =
A Winning Formula
SAP Business One delivers a ton of value across your organization, and it also offers its own solution for synchronizing data with Shopify. But in our experience, even the best ERP can’t specialize in everything, bringing us back to the initial point of this article. Every business is unique, and these qualities are very much part and parcel of the eCommerce experience.
Third Wave’s pre-built eCommerce integrations using Bizweaver provide the essentials out of the box, tuned to the needs of businesses on SAP Business One while providing the flexibility needed to solve for your business’s unique requirements.
Don’t forget to check out the other articles in our SAP Business One and Shopify series:
- Using the Shopify API for SAP Business One Orders
- Using the Shopify API for SAP Business One Inventory
- Using the Shopify API for SAP Business One Deliveries
Ready to explore how Third Wave can transform your eCommerce and ERP environments by integrating them more seamlessly than you thought possible? Reach out to our team today to start the conversation.
