Commerce Integration

Northstar Retail Group has already invested in a capable e-commerce platform for its online store, and has no interest in replacing it — but that platform operates as an island, disconnected from the Business Central instance the finance and inventory teams rely on. Every online order has to be manually re-entered into the back-office system, and stock levels on the website update only once a day via a scheduled export.

This daily lag means customers occasionally purchase items already sold out in-store, and the finance team faces a growing manual reconciliation burden as order volumes increase, matching online payment records against manually entered orders.

Rather than a platform migration, the engagement maps the data models of both systems to identify where inventory, pricing and order structures don't align, then designs the transformation logic needed to keep both systems consistent. The integration is built and tested in a staging environment against representative transaction data before deployment to production, with a monitoring layer added to catch synchronisation errors quickly after go-live.

A dedicated integration layer connects the existing e-commerce storefront to Business Central — synchronising inventory, pricing and order data in near real time without disrupting the storefront experience customers already know, built on an API-based approach with a middleware layer so either system can be updated independently in future.

Expected improvements include online orders flowing directly into the ERP without manual re-entry, and inventory levels syncing near real time rather than once a day — reducing the incidence of customers ordering out-of-stock items.

Finance teams typically see a substantial drop in reconciliation workload, since online orders and payments arrive already matched to structured order records rather than requiring manual matching.