Hi There, it’s Mark Presnell from Convergence, also known as Mr Integration.
Today I want to talk to you about one-way versus bidirectional data synchronization when it comes to eCommerce integrations. We have this conversation a lot with clients, particularly around customer details or debtor details that are synchronised from your business software; your Enterprise Resource Planning software or your Accounting software and out to your website. We often get asked why we don’t get the data synchronised from the website back to the business software as well. When a customer enters their details, they can update their details and that would make it a bit easier for our internal staff. Whilst that’s nice in theory, in reality you end up with a whole lot of messy data. You wouldn’t believe how many people misspell their company name or get the phone number wrong or even make mistakes with their address and now that data is in your core system and noone notices it until something goes wrong. Our recommendation, particularly when it comes to customer and debtor details is that flow of data only goes one way, so you can control the quality of the data in your system, that’s the authority. If a customer wants to request a change or make an update to their data, make available a simple webform for that so that they can submit their changes and they go to an internal staff member who can vet that data so they can update it in your core system and make sure it’s accurate information.
Therefore you have a one way flow. The other one way flow applies to a number of other data sets that we typically deal with such as your product details so that the authority is your business software and those details are synchronised out to your website, online orders on the other hand are entered on your website and synchronised one way back to your business software.
It is important to look at these data flows and understand where there might be some unnecessary complexity in your requirement and see whether that really adds value or not and if not to leave it out; we work with you to get that balance right so that your website does what you want it to do without any unnecessary complexity added to the mix.
If you want to know more about this give us a call or request a free integration assessment at convergence.co.nz and we’ll talk further and see how we might be able to help.
Mark Presnell
Managing Director
Convergence Limited
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