Integrating Sage 200 with WooCommerce or Shopify? Here's what's required
Businesses who use Sage 200 Accounting to manager their inventory, stock, product transactions, customer accounts and more, need to spend a lot of time updating transactional sales information, fixing errors in the data capturing process and doing repetitive tasks.
Running a WooCommerce or Shopify sales platform means there’s now significantly more information that needs to update from Sage 200, like product price, stock, tax rates, SKU descriptions and more. When a business is looking to integrate Sage 200 to WooCommerce or Shopify, it becomes apparent that there’s a little more that needs to be considered than meets the eye.
The Sync Interval with Sage 200 and
When looking at platforms for Sage 200 to WooCommerce or Shopify integration, it’s important to note the sync intervals of your sync tools. This is essentially the time it takes for a change made to product data in Sage 200 to sync through to WooCommerce or Shopify.
If you’re receiving lots of orders on WooCommerce or Shopify, you’ll want a program that can sync in less than 5 minutes. This is to ensure that when an item is sold on WooCommerce or Shopify, that it gets knocked out of stock as quickly as possible once the invoice or sales order has been raised in Sage 200.
If the data is not syncing frequently enough with Sage 200 and WooCommerce or Shopify, there’s a risk that you’ll be selling items on WooCommerce or Shopify that you no longer have stock of – refund, apology email, costs associated with refunds and customer disappointment will lessen the chance a customer is a repeat buyer.
How to Integrate Sage 200 with WooCommerce or Shopify?
In order to automate stock and price updates between Sage 200 and WooCommerce or Shopify, it’s important to understand what’s involved to enable this process to take place:
SDK Connector: In order to read-write with the Sage 200 database, one needs to have installed the Sage 200 SDK module (the “connector” and not the full development license). This ensures 3rd party apps are vetted by Sage for security & compliance, and also ensures data that’s written to-from the Sage 200 database poses no data corruption threat.
Sage 200 Credentials: In order for the Sage 200 to WooCommerce or Shopify integration to take place, you’ll need to supply certain bits of information like “”database name, username, password, system user” etc. so if this is something you may struggle to provide, it’s best to contact your IT service provider, or even Sage Business Partner/Consultant.
WooCommerce/Shopify Credentials: In order to link up your Shopify or WooCommerce account with Storehub.io to sync with Sage 200, you’ll need to have access to your WooCommerce or Shopify store. This access is needed to set up the sync app on Shopify (create it as a custom app) and on WooCommerce you’ll need to set up an API key (this is super simple to do, watch a video on how to do that here.)
What does "Sage 200 eCommerce" Mean?
Often we get asked “do you have Sage 200 eCommerce” when really the customer is looking for is Sage 200 integration with WooCommerce or Shopify. This is because updating stock or price manually is a big time constraint on what would be a productive member of staff. It can take anywhere between 10 and 15 hours per week of 1 or more staff members to keep your eCommerce store running smoothly with up to date information.
How Long Does it take to integrate Sage 200 With WooCommerce or Shopify?
This answer is based on 2 different options:
If you’re paying someone to manually build the integration from scratch, this may take anywhere from 3 to 6 months, and require the skills of a fairly competent developer at significant cost (anywhere from R350 000/$25 000).
If you’re using an “off the shelf solution” like Storehub.io, the integration between Sage 200 and WooCommerce or Shopify can take 15 minutes to complete, with another 10 minutes for testing and handover. Because the software is to easy to set up, there’s no once-off charge associated with the setup, and the customer simply needs to pay for their monthly hosting fees which can be found here.
