E-commerce development for industry and technical equipment

The store is not the item master

Price, stock, outstanding balance and the customer record live in the ERP. The store displays a copy and sends orders back. Stating that plainly changes everything else: the question to settle before the first line of code is the direction of synchronisation, field by field, and who arbitrates when the two systems disagree on the same value.

That decision is made in writing, with the people who use the ERP daily, not at the first conflict spotted in production. A table stating, for each field, who writes and who reads, avoids the classic case where a correction made in the store is overwritten at the next sync — and where nobody can say which value is the right one.

Coding, documents and pack sizes

An industrial reference is defined by a combination of physical characteristics: material, diameter, length, thread, surface treatment. The item code is computed from those characteristics rather than chosen. The product page therefore has to let a buyer narrow down to the exact variant from those criteria, without generating hundreds of near-identical pages that compete with one another.

Industrial buyers often look for the document before the product. Drawings, data sheets, material certificates, multilingual manuals, test reports: these must be versioned, attached to the reference, sometimes restricted to identified accounts, and above all findable by the internal search engine. A document search does not return is a document that does not exist for the buyer.

Then come pack sizes and lead times. Sale by batch, minimum order quantity, imposed quantity step, a replenishment lead time specific to each reference, made-to-order items: these are rules carried by the item and enforced in the basket, not decorative notes. An availability date announced and then contradicted costs more than no date at all.