How to prepare a website for integration

We work with web developers to integrate their clients’ sites into their accounting systems. While Stock2Shop handles the technical aspect of the actual integrations, our web dev partners are important collaborators in the process. Especially when it comes to data preparation.

If you are a web developer looking to make a client’s online business more efficient (or if you run your own online store), this is how you can prepare the site to streamline the integration process.

Creating new products vs Updating existing products

There are two main workflows in a Stock2Shop website integration:

• Syncing updates of stock and price to existing products.
• Creating (and syncing to) new products.

Updating existing products

If the website is already populated with products, then there shouldn’t be much left for you to do beyond ensuring the following:

• The site has a valid SSL certificate (runs on HTTPS)
• All variant SKU codes are populated
• There are no duplicate SKU codes
• The variant SKU codes correlate exactly with the item codes on the accounting system

The client will need to ensure that all the items published on the website are marked “Active” to sync from their accounting system, as per the video below. Stock2Shop will then ensure that these existing products are kept up to date in near real time.

Creating new products

If you are setting up a new site for your client (or yourself), you might prefer to populate it with products before integration, in which case you will need to ensure that the SKUs are prepped as per the section above.

If you would like Stock2Shop to sync products to be created on the website, we can do that for you:

• If all of the products will be single-variant, then there is little more to be done. They will be created on the site when they are marked “Active” to sync (see video above), after which you can add enrichment (see section below).
• If the site will have multi-variant products, then a relationship between “product” and “variant” must exist on the accounting system before it syncs to the website. Below is a video explaining how your client can set this up.

If you are unsure on how to configure the products, here is an article on the relationship between products and variants.

Product enrichment

Enrichment refers to marketing collateral added to online products to make them more attractive and easier to find. Examples of product enrichment include:

• Customer-friendly titles
• Images
• Categories
• Long descriptions
• Custom attributes

If products haven’t been enriched yet, then you can choose whether to do so directly on the website or on the Stock2Shop console.

SCENARIO 1: Products to be enriched directly on the website

Step 1. The item syncs from the accounting system to Stock2Shop.
Step 2. Stock2Shop syncs the item onto the website as is.
Step 3. The item is enriched directly on the website; it’s given a suitable title, an image and long description, and then added to a category.

SCENARIO 2: Products to be enriched on Stock2Shop

Step 1. The item syncs from the accounting system to Stock2Shop.
Step 2. The item is enriched on the Stock2Shop console; it’s given a suitable title, an image, a long description and a category.
Step 3. The fully enriched product is synced onto the website.

Note: this scenario is particularly useful if you are syncing products to multiple online platforms because you only need to add enrichment in one place - the Stock2Shop console.

In order to get ahead of the game, you can prepare an upload spreadsheet with your SKU codes, titles, long descriptions and other enrichment as columns. For images, you can save your images as the SKU code (eg abc.jpg) for easy bulk uploading into the Stock2Shop console (more info on this here).

Technical setup

Stock2Shop syncs data to a website via an API, and receives order payloads via a webhook. We will work with you to set these up, but here is some info on how we do this for each ecommerce platform:

• Shopify
• WooCommerce
• Magento

Get in touch with Stock2Shop to find out how you can stand apart from your competition by delivering an integrated ecommerce system to your clients.