Third party eCommerce website integrations with Connect
Save time and improve efficiency by integrating your existing eCommerce website with our Connect EPoS system.
Benefits of EPoS eCommerce integration
Already have an eCommerce website? Ask us about our webservice integration! You can centralise stock levels, order fulfilment and customer details across your in-store and online eCommerce channels.
Intelligent Retail has been providing webservice environments since 2008. Over this time, we have been refining the service to the needs of the integrators to evolve the approach and simplify implementation. We currently host over fifty webservice integration environments and growing.
Centralised stock control – in-store and online.
Easily update product information from one place.
Download and process orders.
Visibility of customer data.
Better overview across your channels for reporting.
Saves time and improves efficiency.
How the website integration works
We host a single webservice environment independently for each retailer. We then provide you with a unique https URL for you to connect to the webservice.
The approach used is to schedule the PHP script that you write based on the example source code provided. Set this PHP script up as a Linux cron-job or scheduled Windows event on your server. This is usually set to run every 15 minutes, though depends on your selling volumes across the business. High selling volumes may need less than 15 minutes.
We have found over the years of working with integrators, that the key to a smooth, swift integration is avoiding scope expansion through over complicated integration requirements. We have learnt success comes from keeping it simple. Integrate the key data. We have also found, as integrators are developers, the most requested and useful document to provide is example source code detailing exactly what needs to be done. This document will therefore detail the PHP source code examples, which provide the basis for your integration script.
The approach to integration is the same regardless of the third-party e-commerce framework used e.g. Magento, WooCommerce, and many more. As long as you can schedule a custom PHP integration script on your server and write data to the e-commerce website’s database directly. The integration script you write will simply read product and inventory data from the IR webservice and write it to the e-commerce website’s database (and visa-versa for orders). This means the third-party e-commerce framework, or any API provided by them is by-passed, creating a single solution to integrate across multiple providers.