WooCommerce and Dynamics AX Integration

WooCommerce and Dynamics AX integrations can enable major capabilities for a business, by extending the reach, scalability, and ultimately the customer satisfaction of your WooCommerce site, with improved customer interactions on a day-to-day basis. The Dynamics AX integration with WooCommerce that Clarity delivers leverages our Clarity Connect platform, which ties into Dynamics AX using the Dynamics AX AIF (Application Integration Framework). The Dynamics AX AIF essentially enables Dynamics AX to expose information in a very secure and isolated way, according to what is needed for the business. It actually provides a highly robust and well secured publishing model for integration to Dynamics AX, allowing for custom extensions and modifications on any of the endpoints.

Clarity typically leverages the Dynamics AX AIF for integrations with WooCommerce and is able to swiftly expose some of the more common areas. It can then deliver more value through the ability to customize and modify this AIF integration, if needed, to provide very custom and catered endpoints. Some of the more common integrations include products and categories, so that Dynamics AX product and category data can get pushed into WooCommerce to hydrate it with very detailed and rich information.

A lot of baseline data about all the products and categories will commonly lie within the Dynamics AX. These would be things like SKUs, basic pricing information, and maybe price levels per customer. There can also be descriptions and possibly some meta information, but usually the integration between Dynamics AX to WooCommerce brings in all of the baseline data. Then clients and their marketing team members may add further information inside of WooCommerce as per their unique needs and requirements.

VThe Clarity Connect platform is a queue-based model that's very persistent and it will practically make sure that the running integrations will complete for a particular task. Whenever performing this, it's simultaneously checking to see if a record was updated more recently inside of WooCommerce versus inside of Dynamics AX. It has a source of record for the entities, and this can be isolated down to a field level as well, so that certain fields within WooCommerce or Dynamics AX can be the field of record, as opposed to potentially being overwritten if this wasn't enabled and set up accordingly. Therefore, the Dynamics AX integration can bring over data while remaining respectful of previous data already present in WooCommerce, which may have been extended and built from the Dynamics AX baseline data.

Besides product and category data, it's also possible to bring over customer data that includes customer contacts, addresses, orders, and detailed customer record information like tax exempt status. Other types of information that might be helpful to pump into WooCommerce from Dynamics AX are detailed tax rules and tax rates, as well as invoices and quotes.

Order information can additionally incorporate details around the order line items and customer specific pricing. The Dynamics AX AIF platform can populate WooCommerce with entirely new data, such as orders, quotes, or invoices that were created inside of Dynamics AX. These can be pushed into WooCommerce with the Clarity Connect platform, enabling WooCommerce to process payments and complete orders, which may then be pushed back into Dynamics AX if desired. It's also possible to pull data from Dynamics AX into WooCommerce around fulfillment, refund information, shipping status, and other relevant information.

Going Beyond Standard Functionality with Advanced Options

The way that Clarity leverages the Clarity Connect platform is by building out tasks where each one is discreetly completing a job based on a schedule. This procedure can be performed on real time, but on most instances, it runs on a periodic basis using a cron job schedule. This schedule can run every minute, 15 minutes, every hour, day, week, or other predetermined interval, and completes very specific tasks based on your business rules and requirements. These specific tasks can also incorporate data transformations, as well as possibly map to other entities to push and pull from them as needed, based on the desired business logic.

As the connector or the Clarity Connect platform is performing this, it can continue to queue up multiple tasks to run at a time. It can further scale up and down so we can incorporate additional resources, like overall server infrastructure. Bottom line is, we may utilize more resources on an existing infrastructure or bring in supplementary infrastructure and then scale out with a load balancing type of model.

The Clarity Connect tool comes with the ability to leverage enterprise best practices for redundancies and failover. It's fundamentally built to be an enterprise level solution with very intelligent caching mechanisms that can be turned on to enable performance at scale. Finally, with regards to the WooCommerce and Dynamics AX integration, the WooCommerce APIs leverage the WooCommerce REST endpoints. Those endpoints are very robust in general, while they can be extended to incorporate custom entities and fields along with custom plugins for both WordPress and WooCommerce.

The default WooCommerce REST APIs Include many endpoints, with some examples being the following:

• Customers
• Orders and order notes
• Refunds
• Coupons
• Products and all their associated characteristics, such as product variations, attributes, attribute terms, product categories, product shipping classes, product tags, and product reviews

• Tax rates and tax classes
• Settings and setting options
• Payment gateways
• Shipping zones, shipping zone locations, shipping zone methods, and other shipping information
• System status and system status tools
• Data on geography and detailed label information

In addition to the endpoints that the WooCommerce REST API exposes for your Dynamics AX integration, we can also interact with the reporting tools and the detailed granular report data. Those can certainly be integrated with, and another option would be to turn on webhooks which enable live integration with WooCommerce. One of the big benefits of the Clarity Connect platform is how it is task-based and different tasks efficiently run at specific schedules.

If real time data integration is needed, the webhooks allow for an even more robust capability than just the standard WooCommerce REST APIs. In conclusion, we firmly believe that the Dynamics AX and WooCommerce integration can dramatically improve customer service by automating processes that might've been previously manual, and at the same time expose the business to more opportunities. Since the data is coming in real time from Dynamics AX, the offerings of the business are directly getting out to the public facing WooCommerce site to serve end users.

Clarity WooCommerce Integration Experts

We certainly encourage you to reach out to our team of friendly and knowledgeable experts if you'd like to receive a complimentary needs analysis and review of your project. You're always welcome to click on any of the available links on this page to learn more about integrations. If there are any topics that you would like to discuss and aren't covered here, feel free to click on the Ask the Experts link to find out more information. A specialist on WooCommerce and Dynamics AX integrations will provide you with a free and prompt elaboration on any questions you might have.