The Two-Direction Problem: Why B2B Commerce Integrations Fail

This started as a comment on a LinkedIn post by Brett Sinclair about choosing systems integrators for B2B commerce. I kept hitting LinkedIn's character limit, so I'm laying it out properly here.

The Setup

Picture the B2B company - a manufacturer or distributor - in the middle. They know they need to improve their B2B commerce and there are typically two ways they go.

Direction One: The ERP Partner

They go back to their ERP implementation partner. Trusted partner, they set up the foundational system the business runs on, they know that business well. So they reach for the tools available to them - which is usually whatever native connector exists.

And as Adam Ellington said in the thread, what's written on the tin vs the reality of getting it to do what you need it to and see it through to the end are very different things.

They're working with what they know - the ERP side. But they're not fully across the customer-facing platform that the trade orders will flow through.

Direction Two: The Commerce Agency

Or they go to an agency that specialises in B2B platforms. The agency puts their hand up to handle the integration too - they know the platform inside out but getting the right plumbing in place and understanding how the flows are going to interact with both systems requires being across both fully.

More often than not neither side is fully across the other system and what it's capable of.

Where It Unravels

And this is where gaps start to appear.

The ERP side is wading through entity mappings and settings where one misstep overwrites data on the B2B platform side. Support tickets get raised from the implementor with the ERP vendor and everyone's scrambling.

The agency just wants someone to help them make sense of it all - but how are we actually going to surface invoices and make them available to our trade customers? How does customer-specific pricing work? How do we handle order history?

There's entity mapping and then there's actually doing what's needed to help all the parties get this across the line. Those are very different things.

A couple of logos sitting next to each other can make it look like plug and play. It rarely is.

What to Look For When Evaluating an Integration Partner

Ask for Demonstrable Experience

Do they have demonstrable experience with your specific ERP paired with your intended B2B platform? Not "we've looked into this and it all seems achievable."

How will you do it, and have you done it before?

Don't Just Accept Who Gets Put in Front of You

You've done due diligence on selecting an agency partner that can deploy a B2B platform - but who are they recommending for the integration piece, and is that really the best option?

Know what you're getting yourself into. It's much more painful to change tact midway when you realise the integration piece isn't panning out.

Look for End-to-End Understanding

The right integration partner should be able to clearly explain how your B2B commerce is going to run end to end - what your customers will see when they log in, what prices they'll see and why, how invoices will be surfaced to the front end, and how it's all going to meld together.

They'll be across it because they've factored in an understanding of how your business actually works and how this can be applied to both your back-end and front-end facing systems.

The Bottom Line

There's nothing quite like having it work the way you expected.

Need help connecting your ERP to your B2B commerce platform? We specialise in MYOB Exo and Acumatica integrations with Shopify.