OroCommerce Acumatica Integration: Real-Time B2B Commerce on Acumatica

Summarize this article

Acumatica is a cloud ERP widely used by distributors and manufacturers in North America. Paired with OroCommerce, a platform built for B2B commerce, it gives your customers a self-service ordering channel that stays in step with your back office. We have built this integration in production: here is how it works.

What flows between OroCommerce and Acumatica

• From Acumatica to OroCommerce: customers and contacts, stock items and availability by warehouse, customer prices and price classes, order status, shipments and invoices.
• From OroCommerce to Acumatica: sales orders, changes to orders, new customer accounts and addresses.

For companies whose customers reorder the same products every week, such as food distributors, order templates and “order guides” also need to stay identical on both sides.

How to connect the two systems

Acumatica offers a contract-based REST API for business records such as customers, items and sales orders, and OData access to generic inquiries, which makes it possible to read tailored datasets efficiently. It can also send push notifications when data changes, which avoids constant polling. OroCommerce provides a complete API and an integration framework built on message queues.

The integration can be built directly between the two APIs, or through an integration platform (iPaaS) with connectors for both systems. Direct integration gives the most control when your business rules are specific.

Example: RDP Foodservice

RDP Foodservice is a food distributor. Its transformation started with a new ERP, Acumatica, followed by the migration of its B2B e-commerce platform to OroCommerce with Synolia. The brief: an e-commerce platform that handles the constraints of fresh product distribution to professionals and stays synchronized with the new ERP.

The key point of the project was a two-way, real-time synchronization with Acumatica through REST APIs and the OData protocol. Any change to an order or an order guide, whether made in the ERP or on the OroCommerce platform, appears in both systems. Synolia handled consulting, the migration to OroCommerce with an agile method, specific developments and integrations, the ERP synchronization and ongoing support.

Acumatica specifics to plan for

• Pricing. Acumatica manages sales prices per customer and per customer price class, plus discounts. Decide whether OroCommerce stores these prices as price lists or requests them from Acumatica when needed.
• Endpoint versions. Contract-based API endpoints are versioned. Pin the version you integrate with and plan for it in Acumatica upgrades.
• Customizations. Custom fields and screens in Acumatica must be exposed through the API before the integration can use them.

Common pitfalls

• Unclear data ownership between the two systems, which leads to overwritten changes.
• No monitoring of failed messages: in real-time integrations, errors must be visible immediately.
• Testing only the happy path. Order edits, cancellations and partial shipments are where integrations break.

Planning an OroCommerce Acumatica project?

Synolia is one of OroCommerce’s founding SI partners, with dozens of OroCommerce projects delivered. Our team in Santiago, Chile works on US business hours, in English and Spanish. Talk to our team about your Acumatica integration, or read more about our approach to ERP integration.