Integrations & Automation

E-commerce Integration and Automation: The Complete Guide

Every growing e-commerce business reaches a point where manual processes become the bottleneck. Orders copied between systems, inventory tracked in spreadsheets, prices updated one channel at a time — these tasks consume hours that should be spent on growth. E-commerce integration connects your platforms, ERPs, warehouses, and sales channels into a unified, automated operation.

At Duxly, we design and build integrations that eliminate repetitive work, reduce errors, and give you real-time visibility across your entire operation. Whether you are running a single Shopify store connected to an ERP or managing a multi-channel operation spanning marketplaces, wholesale, and retail, the right integration architecture transforms how your business operates.

This guide covers everything you need to know about e-commerce integration: the types of systems involved, common automation patterns, architecture decisions, error handling strategies, and how to measure the return on your integration investment.

Why E-commerce Integration Matters

The average mid-market e-commerce operation uses between five and twelve software systems. Without integration, data lives in silos. Stock levels in your ERP do not match your webshop. Orders sit in queues waiting for manual processing. Pricing changes take hours to propagate across channels.

The consequences are measurable:

• Overselling when inventory is not synchronized across channels
• Delayed fulfillment when orders require manual re-entry into WMS or ERP systems
• Pricing errors when updates are applied inconsistently across marketplaces
• Invoice discrepancies when financial data is reconciled manually
• Customer service issues when order status is not visible across systems

E-commerce automation eliminates these failure points. When systems are properly connected, an order placed on your Shopify store at midnight is automatically sent to your warehouse, reflected in your ERP, and deducted from inventory across every channel — all before your team arrives the next morning.

Types of E-commerce Integrations

ERP Integration

ERP integration is often the most critical connection in an e-commerce operation. Your ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) system is the financial backbone: it manages accounts, invoicing, purchase orders, and often serves as the master source for product and customer data.

Common ERP integration patterns include:

• Order sync: New webshop orders flow into the ERP as sales orders or invoices
• Product data: Item master data, pricing, and stock levels flow from ERP to webshop
• Customer sync: New customers created in the webshop are mirrored in the ERP
• Invoice generation: Completed orders trigger automatic invoice creation
• Purchase order automation: Low stock triggers purchase orders to suppliers

A well-built Shopify ERP integration, for example, ensures that every transaction in your store is immediately reflected in your financial administration without manual data entry.

WMS and Fulfillment Integration

Warehouse Management System (WMS) integrations automate the physical fulfillment of orders. Rather than printing orders from your webshop and re-entering them into your warehouse system, integration creates a direct pipeline.

Key WMS integration capabilities:

• Order routing: Orders flow directly from checkout to pick-pack-ship workflows
• Stock updates: Warehouse receipts and adjustments update all sales channels
• Tracking sync: Shipping labels and tracking numbers flow back to customers automatically
• Returns processing: Return requests trigger warehouse receiving workflows

Marketplace Integration

Selling on multiple marketplaces (Bol.com, Amazon, Mirakl-powered platforms) multiplies complexity. Each marketplace has its own product format, order structure, and inventory requirements. Multi-channel automation keeps these channels synchronized without requiring separate teams to manage each one.

Marketplace integration typically covers:

• Product listing: Catalog data transformed and published to each marketplace format
• Inventory synchronization: Stock levels updated across all channels when any sale occurs
• Order consolidation: Orders from all channels flow into a single fulfillment pipeline
• Pricing management: Price changes and promotions applied consistently across platforms

Payment and Financial Integration

Beyond basic order data, financial integrations handle the nuances of payment reconciliation, tax calculation, and accounting entries. This includes connecting payment providers (Mollie, Stripe, Adyen) with your bookkeeping, automating VAT calculations for cross-border sales, and reconciling marketplace payouts with individual orders.

PIM Integration

Product Information Management (PIM) systems serve as the single source of truth for product data. Integrating your PIM with sales channels ensures consistent product descriptions, images, specifications, and pricing across every touchpoint. When product data changes in your PIM, those updates propagate automatically to your webshop, marketplaces, and print catalogs.

Platforms We Integrate

E-commerce Platforms

Shopify remains the most popular platform among our clients. Its robust API, webhook support, and app ecosystem make it well-suited for integration. We build custom Shopify integrations that go beyond what off-the-shelf apps can deliver — handling complex business logic, custom data mappings, and high-volume transaction processing.

Lightspeed eCom is widely used in the Benelux market. Its API supports product management, order processing, and customer data synchronization. We have deep experience with Lightspeed’s data structures and limitations, enabling integrations that work reliably at scale.

WooCommerce and Magento round out our platform coverage, each with their own API patterns and integration considerations.

ERP and Financial Systems

Exact Online is the most common ERP we integrate with. Its REST API supports sales orders, invoices, items, stock positions, and financial transactions. We handle the complexities of Exact Online’s division structure, custom fields, and batch processing limits.

Multivers (Unit4) is prevalent among wholesale and distribution businesses. Integrating Multivers with e-commerce platforms requires handling its SOAP/REST hybrid API and mapping its specific data structures for articles, orders, and relations.

AFAS Profit serves larger organizations with complex financial and HR needs. Its GetConnectors and UpdateConnectors provide structured access to data, though building reliable integrations requires understanding its specific authentication and data format requirements.

Visma and Twinfield are also part of our integration portfolio, covering businesses across Northern Europe.

WMS and Logistics

Picqer is a modern WMS with a clean API that we integrate for warehouse operations, from goods receipt through pick-pack-ship to returns processing.

Monta provides fulfillment services with API access to order processing, stock management, and shipment tracking.

Sendcloud handles the shipping layer — carrier selection, label generation, and tracking — which we connect to both webshops and WMS systems.

Marketplaces

Bol.com is the dominant marketplace in the Netherlands and Belgium. Its Plaza API handles product listings, orders, inventory, and returns.

Amazon (EU marketplaces) via Seller Central or SP-API for product catalog management, order processing, and FBA integration.

Mirakl-powered marketplaces (such as those run by large retailers) use the Mirakl Marketplace Platform API for operator integration.

For a detailed look at how these integrations come together in practice, explore our case studies.

Common Automation Patterns

Order Flow Automation

The most impactful automation for most businesses is the order-to-fulfillment pipeline. A fully automated order flow looks like this:

1. Customer places an order on the webshop
2. Payment is confirmed by the payment provider
3. Order data is transformed and sent to the WMS or fulfillment partner
4. Simultaneously, the order is created in the ERP as a sales order
5. Warehouse picks, packs, and ships the order
6. Tracking information flows back to the webshop and is sent to the customer
7. Upon delivery confirmation, the ERP generates an invoice
8. Financial entries are posted automatically

Each step that previously required manual intervention — copying order details, entering them into another system, sending shipping confirmations — becomes automatic. The result is faster fulfillment, fewer errors, and a team freed to handle exceptions rather than routine processing.

Inventory Synchronization

Inventory synchronization is where integration complexity often lives. The challenge is not just syncing stock levels — it is handling the edge cases: reserved stock, safety margins, warehouse-specific availability, and multi-location inventory.

A robust inventory sync implementation considers:

• Multi-source stock: Combining available quantities from multiple warehouses or suppliers
• Channel-specific buffers: Reserving stock percentages for specific channels or customer segments
• Backorder handling: Communicating expected availability dates when stock is depleted
• Bundle and kit logic: Calculating availability for composite products based on component stock
• Purchase order visibility: Showing incoming stock that has been ordered but not yet received

The synchronization frequency matters too. For high-volume operations, near-real-time sync (via webhooks or frequent polling) prevents overselling. For slower-moving catalogs, scheduled batch updates may be sufficient and simpler to maintain.

Pricing and Promotion Automation

Multi-channel pricing introduces its own complexities. Different channels may require different price points, and promotions need to be applied consistently according to business rules.

Pricing automation patterns include:

• Master price management: Prices maintained in one system (ERP or PIM) and distributed to all channels
• Margin-based pricing: Marketplace prices calculated automatically based on cost price plus margin rules
• Promotional sync: Sale prices and date ranges pushed to all channels simultaneously
• Currency handling: Base prices converted to local currencies for international channels
• B2B pricing tiers: Customer-specific pricing pulled from ERP for wholesale portal orders

Automated Invoicing and Financial Reporting

Financial automation closes the loop between sales and accounting. Rather than manually creating invoices or reconciling payments, integration handles:

• Automatic invoice generation upon order completion or shipment
• Payment matching between payment provider reports and ERP entries
• VAT calculation and reporting for multi-country sales
• Periodic financial reporting pulled from integrated data sources
• Credit note automation for returns and refunds

For deeper insights into how analytics connect with your integrated operations, see our analytics and optimization services.

Integration Architecture: Making the Right Technical Choices

Real-time vs. Batch Processing

Not every integration needs to be real-time. Understanding when to use each approach is crucial for building maintainable, cost-effective systems.

Real-time (event-driven) is appropriate when:

• Stock accuracy is critical (high-volume, limited inventory)
• Customer experience depends on immediate updates (order status, tracking)
• Financial compliance requires timely recording of transactions

Batch processing is appropriate when:

• Data changes are infrequent (weekly price updates, catalog changes)
• The receiving system has API rate limits or processing windows
• Perfect consistency is less critical than system simplicity
• Large data volumes need to be processed efficiently

Most e-commerce integrations use a hybrid approach: real-time for orders and stock, batch for product data and reporting.

Webhooks vs. Polling

Webhooks are push-based notifications. When an event occurs (new order, stock change), the source system sends a message to your integration endpoint. Webhooks provide near-instant data flow and reduce unnecessary API calls.

However, webhooks have limitations:

• Not all platforms support them for every event type
• Webhook delivery is not guaranteed — messages can be lost
• Your endpoint must be available to receive them
• Order of delivery is not always guaranteed

Polling is pull-based. Your integration checks the source system at regular intervals for new or changed data. Polling is more predictable and easier to debug, but introduces latency and generates more API traffic.

Best practice: use webhooks as the primary trigger with polling as a safety net. A scheduled “catch-up” job ensures nothing is missed if a webhook fails to deliver.

Middleware and Integration Platforms

For complex multi-system environments, a middleware layer provides several advantages:

• Transformation: Data format conversion between systems with different structures
• Orchestration: Managing multi-step workflows that span several systems
• Queuing: Buffering messages when downstream systems are temporarily unavailable
• Logging: Centralized audit trail of all data movements
• Retry logic: Automatic retry of failed operations with exponential backoff

We typically build integration middleware as serverless applications (AWS Lambda, API Gateway) or lightweight containerized services. This approach provides scalability without the overhead of maintaining dedicated integration servers. For specialized requirements, we also build custom software solutions that serve as the integration backbone.

API-first vs. File-based Integration

While modern integrations are predominantly API-based, some systems (particularly older ERPs or EDI-based supply chains) still require file-based data exchange. Common file formats include CSV, XML, and EDIFACT.

Our integrations handle both paradigms, often acting as a bridge: receiving data via API from modern systems and transforming it into file drops for legacy systems, or monitoring SFTP folders for inbound files and pushing the data into modern platforms via API.

Error Handling and Monitoring

Integration reliability is not about preventing all errors — it is about handling them gracefully when they occur. Network timeouts, API rate limits, data validation failures, and system outages are inevitable. What matters is how your integration responds.

Error Handling Strategies

Retry with exponential backoff: Transient errors (network timeouts, 503 responses) are retried automatically with increasing delays between attempts. This handles temporary issues without overwhelming the target system.

Dead letter queues: Messages that fail after all retry attempts are moved to a dead letter queue for manual review. Nothing is lost, and the integration continues processing other items.

Idempotency: Every operation is designed to be safely retryable. Sending the same order twice does not create a duplicate in the ERP. This is achieved through unique identifiers and “create or update” logic.

Circuit breakers: When a downstream system is consistently failing, the circuit breaker pattern stops sending requests temporarily, preventing cascade failures and allowing the system to recover.

Data validation: Inbound data is validated before processing. Invalid records are flagged and reported rather than causing downstream errors.

Monitoring and Alerting

We build monitoring into every integration from day one. This includes:

• Transaction dashboards: Visual overview of sync status, throughput, and error rates
• Alerting: Immediate notifications (email, Slack, or other channels) when error thresholds are exceeded
• Audit logging: Complete record of every data transformation and API call for debugging and compliance
• Health checks: Automated verification that all integration endpoints are responsive
• SLA tracking: Measuring whether data flows meet the agreed latency requirements

The goal is that your team knows immediately when something needs attention, and has the tools to understand what happened and why.

The Integration Process: Our Methodology

Building reliable integrations requires a structured approach. Rushing to code without understanding the full picture leads to brittle connections that break under real-world conditions.

Phase 1: Discovery and Process Mapping

We start by mapping your current workflows in detail. Which systems are involved? Where does data originate? What transformations happen along the way? Where are the manual steps, and which of those are error-prone or time-consuming?

This phase produces a clear picture of:

• All systems and their roles in the data flow
• Current pain points and error-prone processes
• Data ownership (which system is the “source of truth” for each entity)
• Volume and frequency requirements
• Exception handling requirements

Phase 2: Integration Design

With the process map complete, we design the integration architecture. This includes:

• Data flow diagrams showing exactly how information moves between systems
• Field mapping specifications (which field in System A corresponds to which field in System B)
• Transformation rules for data that needs conversion
• Error handling specifications for each failure scenario
• Monitoring and alerting requirements
• Performance requirements (throughput, latency, availability)

The design is documented and reviewed with your team before any development begins. Changes caught at the design stage cost a fraction of changes discovered during testing.

Phase 3: Build and Test

Development follows the design specification, with each integration component built incrementally and tested in isolation before being connected to live systems.

Testing covers:

• Unit tests: Individual transformation functions work correctly
• Integration tests: Systems communicate properly with test data
• Load tests: The integration handles your expected (and peak) transaction volumes
• Failure tests: The system behaves correctly when downstream services are unavailable
• End-to-end tests: Complete workflows produce the expected results in all connected systems

Phase 4: Deployment and Migration

Moving from test to production requires careful coordination. We typically deploy integrations alongside existing processes initially, running in parallel to verify correctness before cutting over. For data that needs to be synchronized initially (existing products, customers, open orders), we handle the data migration as part of the deployment plan.

Phase 5: Monitoring and Optimization

After go-live, we monitor the integration closely during the stabilization period. Performance is optimized based on real-world usage patterns, and any edge cases not covered during testing are addressed. Long-term, the integration is maintained and updated as connected systems evolve their APIs or your business requirements change.

ROI and Business Impact

Integration projects require investment, and that investment should be justified by measurable returns. Here is how we think about integration ROI:

Direct Time Savings

The most immediate return comes from eliminating manual work. Consider a business processing 200 orders per day where each order requires 3 minutes of manual data entry across systems. That is 10 hours of staff time per day — roughly 1.5 FTEs dedicated entirely to copying data between screens. Automation reduces this to near zero, with staff time redirected to exception handling and customer service.

Error Reduction

Manual data entry has a typical error rate of 1-3%. For a business processing 6,000 orders per month, that means 60-180 orders with errors — each requiring investigation, correction, and potentially customer communication. Integration reduces data errors to near zero for automated processes, with the remaining errors being systematic (and therefore fixable) rather than random.

Speed to Market

When adding a new sales channel, a well-architected integration platform means the new channel can be connected in days rather than weeks. Product data, inventory, and order processing are already standardized — only the new channel’s specific adapter needs to be built.

Inventory Accuracy

For businesses with thin margins or limited stock, the cost of overselling (cancelled orders, customer disappointment, marketplace penalties) or underselling (stock sitting in warehouse, missed sales) is significant. Real-time inventory synchronization across all channels minimizes both risks.

Scalability

Perhaps most importantly, integrated operations scale without proportional headcount increases. A manual operation that needs one additional staff member for every 100 daily orders hits a ceiling quickly. An automated operation handles 500 orders per day with the same team that handled 50.

When to Build Custom vs. Use Off-the-Shelf Connectors

Not every integration needs to be built from scratch. The decision between custom development and existing connector apps depends on several factors:

Off-the-shelf connectors work well when:

• Your requirements match the standard use case exactly
• Data mapping is straightforward (one-to-one field matching)
• Transaction volumes are within the connector’s limits
• You do not need custom business logic in the data flow
• The connector is actively maintained and supported

Custom integration is the better choice when:

• Your business logic requires custom transformations or validations
• You need to combine data from multiple sources before syncing
• Off-the-shelf options do not support your specific system versions or configurations
• You need granular control over error handling and retry behavior
• Performance requirements exceed what generic connectors can deliver
• You have unique data structures (custom fields, non-standard entities)
• You need a unified monitoring dashboard across all integrations

In practice, many businesses use a combination: off-the-shelf connectors for simple, standard flows and custom integrations for the complex, business-critical processes that differentiate their operation.

We also see businesses outgrowing their initial connector apps as they scale. What works at 50 orders per day may not work at 500. Planning for this growth from the start — even if the initial implementation uses simpler tools — saves significant rework later.

Getting Started with E-commerce Integration

Whether you are connecting your first ERP to your webshop or orchestrating a complex multi-channel operation, the approach is the same: start with the highest-impact, clearest-requirement integration first, prove the pattern, then expand.

Most of our clients begin with one of these starting points:

• Order-to-ERP sync: Eliminating manual order entry into their financial system
• Inventory synchronization: Preventing overselling across multiple sales channels
• Product data distribution: Maintaining consistent catalog data from a single source
• Fulfillment automation: Connecting their webshop directly to their warehouse operation

From there, additional integrations are layered on as the business grows and new channels or systems are added. Each new connection benefits from the architecture and patterns established by the first.

For an overview of pre-built solutions and supported platform combinations, visit our solutions page.

Ready to eliminate manual work and connect your e-commerce systems? Get in touch for a free integration assessment. We will map your current processes, identify the highest-impact automation opportunities, and propose a concrete integration plan tailored to your operation.