Ecommerce - SAP interface

[Former Member]

Hi Experts,

Need your expertise in designing the interface. We are designing a web application for customers to order online. Later these orders willbe uploaded to SAP.

We are planning for customers to view the realtime pricing. Inorder to acieve this we can make RFC call or upload the entire pricing logic/tables everyday in the web application . Ideally we would like to make webservice calls to SAP for pricing but considering the performance perspective in calling RFC function for pricing of each item, we are looking at the file transfers . Could you please suggest any the best option to handle pricing in SAP/Web interface? Thanks a lot.

[Former Member]

Why would you want to reinvent the wheel? Why not just implement and customize SAP E-Commerce instead? SAP E-Commerce is pretty customizable since it's a Java based application. If you go the custom route, you are looking at couple of months of implementation effort, at least. Sure there are Web Services and APIs to interface with the backend. Some of the APIs are remote-enabled and others can be made remote-enabled but even then you are looking at implementing the UI, local webshop database, etc. Once you have implemented the custom solution you have to maintain it, keep updating it when SAP changes, etc.

If you choose SAP E-Commerce, you have a wide choice of implementation partners and once implemented, it is easier to get support when you need it.

[sam_bayer]

This message was moderated.

[Jelena_Perfiljeva]

Unless your prices change more than once daily, I'd agree that making an RFC call for every item would not be efficient.

We use Magento for ecommerce and prices are maintained on the web site. I believe they're uploaded manually from a file and file is created using standard SAP transactions (at least we didn't write any custom programs for it). But our prices change infrequently and also we don't have very robust pricing structure (scales, etc.).

[sam_bayer]

Hi Jelena,

I am assuming that yours is a B2C ecommerce implementation where prices may indeed be very simple and static and can be reproduced from SAP onto the Magento platform.  I also suspect that you're website is fairly low traffic and volume.  Otherwise, issues of inventory management and order tracking would become significant integration issues for you.

Building the do-it-yourself interface for Magento/SAP integration for the B2B eCommerce scenario is not a trivial project and has caused many a project team to abandon their efforts.

Sam

[sam_bayer]

One very popular (and the most cost effective) approach is to use Magento as your eCommerce front end.  That takes care of all of your user experience requirements.  Depending on the complexity and timeliness requirements for the interactions with SAP, the simplest solution is to set up a family of batch programs to synchronize pricing and place orders.  However, we've found that while SAP integration requirements usually start out innocently enough, they usually grow in complexity pretty quickly.  In short order, your customers will not only want accurate pricing information, but inventory, credit checking, tax calculating, variable freight selection, order tracking, order history, invoices etc. <<Removed by Moderator>>

Sam Bayer

Message was edited by: Marcelo Ramos

[Former Member]

This message was moderated.

[sam_bayer]

Hi Ajay,

The infrastructure is all in place to support woocommerce or any other eCommerce application that allows for web services calls.

Sam

[Former Member]

Hello Sam,

That's  great !!!

To do this I was going to use Woocommerce  REST API to connect to SAP Business One ,

do we have any other better alternative to do this.

-Warm Regards

Ajay Nayak