The Business Sites

Rather than driving miles to get to a supermarket, now you can sit in the comforts of your own home, browse through the web, access an Ecommerce site, look for products you wish to buy, add them to your shopping cart, and make the payment online. In the next few days, and sometimes even the same day, the products are delivered to your address. Thus, you end up saving money on fuel and also save valuable time. Ecommerce has thus become a popular concept among the business community as well as the shoppers. Apart from providing ERP solution needed by a business, it is quiet important to have E-commerce that is commerce conducted electronically. E-commerce has revolutionized communication and business strategies. Software companies involved in Ecommerce software development services are used by big and small business houses to increase their business areas. An E-commerce website developed by custom software development team includes ingredients that make it attractive, organized with apt use of color and font.

There are many web software application development companies that specialize in Ecommerce software development. These companies offer packaged software applications as well as custom application development. There are also many Open Source Ecommerce solutions which can be installed with or without modifications. These include Ecommerce CMS and shopping carts. Open Source solutions are cheaper to develop and also offer full features and security system. Moreover, extended functionalities and features can be added to give more control on the site manager as well as convenience to the shoppers. An Ecommerce solution provider offers development and customization of different Ecommerce solutions.

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:

If you have Microsoft Dynamics GP implemented in your organization as Corporate ERP application and now you are looking for phase two, where such nice feature as ecommerce shopping cart is subject for the integration, this small publication is for you.  First of all we would like to share with you our believes  that ecommerce shopping carts, such as Magento/PHP (especially when you are on Linux), ASP.Net Storefront, Nop Commerce and others, are pretty robust and there is no real need to program shopping cart from scratch internally (until you are really huge ecommerce wholesaler or retailer, where you prefer to have complete control over program proprietary business logic and source code, and have the budget to afford that kind of luxury approach).  In our case, we tried to give you ecommerce add-on for Microsoft Dynamics GP (often referred by its historical name Great Plains Dynamics and eEnterprise, in case if you have some confusion with the application name) where you simply follow setup wizard, selecting your ecommerce shopping cart name from drop down list on one of the initial steps.  Other steps are specific to Dynamics GP typical integration with ecommerce: settings in Inventory Control, Sales order Processing modules: