Question
I work for an ERP company in Europe who will soon be entering the US market and would like to partner with Modern Retail. Your approach is exactly what we need because we have no interest in developing integrations with Magento, Shopify, Bigcommerce and WooCommerce. Partnering with you to do these integrations for us would be perfect. However, I know most of our clients would like to ship their online orders within our system instead of doing them on the e-commerce platform side (e.g. instead of doing them in Magento, Shopify, Bigcommerce and WooCommerce). I just read the following article about your approach here:
What are the things we need to consider when we do the shipping within our ERP system?
Answer
Thank you. We're very proud of what we've built and have worked hard to make it easy for companies such as yours to get integrated with the most popular e-commerce platforms. Our approach is unique in that we only have to do an integration ONCE with your ERP system, and as soon as we're done, your customers will immediately be able to integrate with Bigcommerce, Magento, Shopify, and WooCommerce.
We have a variety of ways of getting integrated with your ERP system, but given that you have a robust API, it will be fairly easy to get connected to it using our Middleware/API.
Use Cases
Okay, to finally get to your question. The following use cases should be examined when shipping online orders from a POS or ERP system:
- Complete Shipments
- This would be considered the "sunny day scenario."
- The order is sent down to the ERP system, and every item can be shipped.
- This is the easiest to solve and oftentimes includes sending the shipping and package tracking information back to the website.
- Partial Shipments
- There are really two different cases we need to consider when talking about Partial Shipments: (a) everything eventually gets shipped and (b) one or more items can't be shipped.
- Generally, it isn't a problem when the ERP eventually ships everything from the order. The shipping and tracking information is sent to the e-commerce platform where it is used to update the shopper.
- The case that can cause issues is when one or more items can't be shipped, and the ERP system needs to cancel an item in the order. What needs to be considered here is how funds will be handled for items that aren't shipped. Luckily, Modern Retail has solved this for many of the e-commerce platforms.
- Returns/Refunds
- Doing Returns or Refunds within the ERP system isn't necessarily difficult, but again, you need to consider how the user's credit card will be credited in these cases.
- Solutions vary by e-commerce platform and even the credit card processor, but in general, it can be done and the funds can even be automatically transferred. However, there's often a 30-day window where this can be done because the "token" expires after this time.
- Exchanges/Substitutions/Changes
- Exchanges, substitutions and changes in the POS or ERP system are probably the most difficult use cases to solve. Not only do you need to account for the order changes, but you also need to be able to handle the debit or credit of funds. Additionally, ERP systems can handle things very differently in these cases, and all possible scenarios need to be considered.
- Again, Modern Retail has solved this problem, but the solution may vary depending on the e-commerce platform.
I think that about does it. Please contact us if you have any questions. Thank you.