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Microsoft Dynamics GP, formerly also known as Great Plains Dynamics, eEnterprise, is flexible and powerful platform for eCommerce B2B and B2C Shopping Cart integration.  If you are ecommerce programmer, please read this introduction level publication on integrating ecommerce shopping cart into SOP Invoice or Sales Order in Dynamics GP.  Being bound by article genre rules, we will try to be reasonably laconic and balance technical (for developers and programming) and functional (for IT managers) information.  We will pay some attention to Microsoft Dexterity and its possible role in GP eCommerce integrations:

1. Sales Order Processing Invoice or Sales Order as ecommerce shopping cart destination.  In our opinion this object is the most natural for being considered as shopping cart destination in GP.  SOP Transaction has document header, where you specify customer, doc number, dates, addresses, shipping info, tax and other document level info.  Plus, it has Items lines, where you add your shopping cart items and link them with the information on availability in stock, allocation (when applicable), back ordering, or you can even have your line items as services, or non inventory items, where you are not bound by Inventory tracking.  If you think SOP Transaction is the right object for ecommerce shopping cart integration, you need to choose the integration tool or technology

If you already have eCommerce website with popular ecommerce shopping cart platforms, such as ASP .Net Store Front, or Magento/PHP in Business-to-Business or Business-to-Customer models, we would like to give you highlights on shopping cart integration to Microsoft Dynamics GP or Great Plains, how this mid-market Corporate ERP application was known initially.  First of all, we would like to stress, that in our believe popular ecommerce shopping cart platforms have quite a large number of installations in USA and internationally (they are pretty solid with most of the bugs detected and fixed with direct customer support from the original software development companies) and we discourage you to do custom shopping cart programming.  We also believe that customers with existing ecommerce web application do not like the idea to trash the ecommerce website and redeploy it on another product base – we respect that position and we would like to help you on getting existing ecommerce site integrated with your ERP application, in our example it is Microsoft Dynamics GP:

1. Where shopping cart goes in Dynamics GP?  The most natural way is to transform shopping cart into Sales Order Processing Sales Order or Invoice.  If you are mid-market or large ecommerce wholesaler (B2B) or retailer (B2C), we recommend you to select SOP type for ecommerce integration with manual line items allocation, as you would likely need to fulfill the Order on the warehouse floor with Picking and Packing with Barcode scanning, please see Warehouse Management System section below on details.  If you are selling with full or partial prepayment (customer credit card) – it is Customer Deposit against Sales Document

If you are using Dynamics GP (or even its older version, when it was known as Great Plains Dynamics) and now you are thinking about exposing this Corporate ERP application to ecommerce shopping cart interface, you probably want shopping cart to be transformed into Sales Order Processing document.  SOP transaction could be either Invoice (with Credit Card deposits, in B2C ecommerce scenario), Return, Sales Order (where you would like to control fulfillment in separate process, probably in Warehouse Management System) or even Quote (useful in B2B ecommerce scenario, when you sell on account and you would like your customers to be able to configure the Quote with their price levels, possible bundles with additional discounts, etc.).  Well, you may say, these mappings look absolutely natural and great to me, but how they could be realized or programmed? And by the way – we have existing ecommerce website, which we coded in-house with our IT programmers – we would like to preserve this ecommerce web application.  Let’s try to look at your options:

When you have legacy in-house programmed ecommerce web application in production with shopping cart, credit card payment interface, B2B or B2C items catalogs and promotional pricing – which does the job – likely that you will favor the idea to leave it there and try the way of ecommerce integration connectors to your Microsoft Dynamics GP Corporate ERP application.  Another option would be to try existing ecommerce module (available from various Dynamics GP ecommerce ISV partners, you can make your research or call Microsoft Business Solutions).  Respecting your approach to program ecommerce integration, we would like to offer this small publication, where we are considering several options and ecommerce programming instruments:

1. Batch Mode ecommerce to Dynamics GP Great Plains Integration approach.  Here we assume that you have reasonable low volume of daily ecommerce invoices or sales orders (in B2B ecommerce you may work on Sales Order execution level and then transferring completed order to Sales invoice).  Batch mode assumes that you export your daily ecommerce documents into text files and then run integration manually.  For Batch mode integration we recommend you to deploy Dynamics GP Integration Manager.  If your source files for integration are text files exports from ecommerce web application, then IM is end user friendly and you may decide to do self discovery or call our office for short Integration Manager introduction in eCommerce integration design.  With IM, however, you can try more sophisticated approach, where you pull data directly from SQL Server (MySQL/PHP, Oracle, MS Access) ecommerce database.  IM has Advanced ODBC Data Source, where you can deploy such advanced SQL techniques as Union

If you are on the way to evaluate Microsoft Dynamics GP ecommerce integration options, and in your case you already have custom programmed (often in-house) ecommerce web application in production and you do not like the idea to redeploy ecommerce on new platform (and write off investment in legacy ecommerce program) – we respect your approach and would like to recommend you this small publication.  Instead of promising so-called “turn-key” ecommerce to Corporate ERP tandem, we recommend you so-called “solutions” approach, where your ecommerce programmers deploy and tune connectors, libraries or code samples, proven and tested in multiple ecommerce integration to Dynamics GP environments:

1. Ecommerce master-slave concept.  Before you jump into the technology details, let’s speculate about strategy.  If your current ecommerce website application has rich functionality (inventory item adding, counting, pricing, including sales promotion campaigns, potentially logistic automation by initiating product allocation to Sales Order and delivery, new and existing customers maintenance, etc) then you may decide to make your current ecommerce application to be a master and push its records to Dynamics GP (which should be in this case Slave application).  Often we see opposite situation, where ecommerce application is pretty simple and all the logic is done in Microsoft Dynamics GP and records should be pushed to ecommerce (here we have GP as master and ecommerce as slave)