API connectorsand webhooks.
The site, the CRM, the accounting and the warehouse are usually four separate worlds, and the bridge between them is a person retyping. A connector turns that bridge into something that runs by itself.
What you get
What we connect.
The principle is one source of truth and everything else synchronised. Without it you end up with three versions of the same figure.
The site and the business systems
An order from the site that arrives in the system by itself, with no retyping and no mistakes.
- Orders from the shop into the ERP
- Stock levels from the warehouse onto the site
- Prices and promotions from a single source
- Delivery status back to the customer
- Invoices and delivery notes
Enquiries and the CRM
An enquiry from a form that becomes a task in the CRM straight away, with its source and its history.
- Site forms into the CRM
- The enquiry source preserved all the way through
- Sales notified immediately
- Connected to the calendar
- Duplicate records prevented
Couriers and payment providers
Shipments created automatically and statuses coming back, with no manual entry into three systems.
- A shipment created from the order
- Label printing
- Shipment status back into the system and to the customer
- Connected to the payment providers
- Payment reconciliation
Reliability
A connector that quietly stops working is worse than manual entry, because nobody notices for a week.
- A retry when the other side does not respond
- An alert when something does not go through
- A log of every exchange
- Double sending prevented
- Monitoring and health checks
How it runs
How it runs.
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Week 1
The data map
Which figure lives where, who changes it, and what the source of truth is. This is half the job.
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Week 2 - 4
Build
The connector, the error handling and the log. Tested with real data on a staging environment.
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Weeks 4 - 5
Running in parallel
It runs alongside the existing manual process until it has proved itself reliable.
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After
Monitoring
Alerts when something gets stuck, and regular checks.
Who this is for
Who it works for, and who it does not.
It makes sense if:
- You have two or more systems with data being retyped between them
- The systems have an API, or at least a data export
- Retyping errors cost you time or money
It does not make sense if:
- The system has no API and no way at all of letting data out
- The data moves once a month and in small quantities
Before building, we check whether both systems have an API at all and what it allows. Sometimes the answer is that it cannot be done, and we say so before starting.
Frequently asked questions