eCommerce Shopping Cart Microsoft Dynamics GP Integration Options

Great Plains has several integration tools and this is important to pick the right one for your case.  In this small publication we are reviewing ecommerce shopping cart mapping and integration programming to Dynamics GP:
1. Shopping Cart Mapping.  Usually in Dynamics GP you import Shopping Cart as Sales Order Processing Invoice or Sales Order.  Sales Order gives you more options in designing fulfillment, approval cycle, picking and packing as Sales Order should be finally transformed into the Invoice.  If you like to have it as simple as possible and you do not care about Order execution phases, you may send shopping cart directly to SOP Invoice.  On both Order and Invoice in Dynamics GP you can have Customer deposit (in the form of Check, Cash or Credit Card payment).  eCommerce Shopping Cart items could be either normal Sales Inventory items, Services, Miscellaneous Charges, etc. in GP or even non-inventory items (not registered in Inventory control)
2. eCommerce Catalog.  Here you need to decide if you would like to originate all your items and prices from Dynamics GP inventory module, or just push everything from ecommerce (in that case items and prices are have ecommerce origin).  It is often the question about self sufficiency of your ecommerce web application - if you are building ecommerce from scratch, you may decide to use as much GP logic and objects as possible.  On the other hand - if your ecommerce is pretty complex in its logic and works in production for many years - good approach would be simple shopping cart push to GP SOP transaction
3. Shopping Cart integration options.  One of the easiest and the most reliable methods is Integration Manager in GP.  IM maybe called by operator, or it could be scheduled to run every half an hour (quasi real time mode) or every night (batch mode).  If your ecommerce sits in non Microsoft platform, such as Oracle, PHP/MySQL/Linux, we recommend you to review Advanced ODBC queries in IM< where you can call something like MS SQL Server cross platform Select statements (those could be shaped as SQL Views, if desired).  If you absolutely need real time integration, where shopping cart posting in ecommerce should automatically trigger its move to Dynamics GP invoice - consider eConnect programming.  eConnect is GP SDK, where you can add eConnect libraries directly to your Microsoft Visual Studio C# or VB.Net ecommerce web application and control GP objects from there (SOP Invoice, Customer, Item and others).  We do not recommend direct SQL scripts for integration as you have very high potential to violate GP business logic - use eConnect or IM instead, where you can have the same results (probably with lesser learning curve) and automatic business logic validation (within IM routines or eConnect objects)
4. Automatic GP transaction or batch posting from ecommerce application.  Both eConnect and Integration Manager allow you to create master records (customer, address, item) and work transactions (Invoice or Sales Order) and place them in the batch for further review and posting directly in GP by Great Plains user.  If you would like to do all the job from ecommerce, including batch posting, you need Alba Spectrum Posting Server
5. How to get further help?  Please, call us: 1-866-528-0577, 1-630-961-5918 or email us: help@albaspectrum.com