Your webshop and your ERP should be talking

A new order comes in on the webshop. Someone copies it into the ERP. Someone else updates the stock spreadsheet. At the end of the month, the invoices get checked against the payments by hand. It works, until volume grows, or someone is on holiday.

When the front of house and the back office don’t talk, you pay for it three times: in hours spent re-typing, in mistakes that reach customers, and in decisions made on numbers that are already out of date.

What should flow between them

Most businesses get the biggest win from connecting a few core flows:

• Orders from the webshop into the ERP as sales orders, automatically.
• Customers created or updated once, not in three places.
• Stock levels from the ERP back to the shop, so you don’t sell what you don’t have.
• Prices and products managed in one place and published to the shop.
• Invoices and payment status linked to the original order.

And if you use a CRM like Salesforce, the same customer and order data can keep your sales team up to date without extra admin.

Three ways to connect

1. Use the ERP’s own shop. Odoo includes website and e-commerce apps that share the same database as sales, inventory and invoicing. For some businesses, that’s the simplest route.
2. Use a connector. Platforms like Shopify, Odoo and Salesforce all have ecosystems of apps and connectors. When a good one exists for your exact setup, it’s often the fastest option.
3. Build an integration. When your processes are specific, a tailored integration using the platforms’ APIs gives you full control over what moves, when, and how errors are handled.

Start with one flow

You don’t have to connect everything at once. Pick the flow that costs you the most time today (usually orders into the ERP) and get that one right. Then add the next.

If your shop and your back office aren’t on speaking terms yet, let’s talk. Connecting the two ends is exactly what I do.