Unlock Business Potential through Intelligent Implementations

The processes your team presently completes in a manual -or mostly manual- way can be significantly automated via a NetSuite integration with an existing eCommerce system. This can further enable extensive abilities for personalization and individualized self-service for end users, as well as optimized workflows and productivity for internal users. The ultimate goal for a NetSuite integration is to provide the ability to scale and build a long-term capability for continual growth by improving the business offering for end users. The integration allows for efficient completion of key business processes that would otherwise be very expensive and cumbersome to scale.

Due to the inherent complexity that is present within a NetSuite eCommerce integration, a successful implementation should involve more than just technical knowledge; it also needs to incorporate the logic of business processes. Your selected partner will provide business recommendations and suggested best practices based on their overall experience that comes after completing countless eCommerce integrations with NetSuite. The Clarity team certainly welcomes the opportunity to work with you and apply the wisdom of extensive experience on your upcoming project. We also encourage you to evaluate the selected integration platform to ensure it supports advanced scalability and enterprise-level functionality.

Clarity Connect offers the creation of very dynamic and adaptive integration tasks or jobs as a core off-the-shelf ability. The tasks can be further customized, extended, and catered to your specific business requirements from a business workflow and a data transformation perspective. This allows them to be very adaptive and meet the specific business needs that are in place for your end customers and internal users, instead of having to settle and adapt to integration limitations. From a technical aspect, the integration between NetSuite and an existing eCommerce platform is typically going to leverage the web REST-based API of NetSuite as well as the REST-based eCommerce web API framework. Therefore, a deep understanding of the APIs is an asset that your ideal integration partner should possess.

Numerous Available Entities to Match Your Business Scenarios

When the integration begins, some of the standard out-of-the-box offerings will include:

• Customers and accounts
• Categories and products
• Product catalog, which might contain attributes, associations, and related products
• Sales orders
• Invoices and quotes
• Shipments and shipment status
• Payments
• Users
• Locations

Of course, custom entities and fields can also be integrated within customers and accounts. You may choose to bring addresses, such as shipping and billing, as well as contacts that are synced from NetSuite into an eCommerce system as users. These contacts might have a hierarchy in NetSuite that can be in turn translated into roles, access information, or corresponding hierarchy.

An additional possibility is to import core account information, such as:

• Tax data, tax levels, and tax exemption status
• Pricing, pricing groups or rules, and quantity-based price discounts
• Credit limits or the ability to purchase on account
• Past order history and past inventory of items

This information is especially useful when the need arises for replacement and ongoing support for complicated items or machinery, but it's also useful for providing recommendations. You may even allow invoices and quotes that are generated in NetSuite to push into an eCommerce platform, where the end user will be able to complete a payment and have that data return into NetSuite to verify the status of the invoice and update it as paid.

On the subject of payments, it's very common for sales orders, invoices, or quotes to be pulled from NetSuite. The flow can also be in the opposite direction, as an order pushed into NetSuite. The information may go back and forth many times, for example a NetSuite quote can be converted into an order in your eCommerce platform and then returned into NetSuite in the updated state. That order information usually contains any of the following:

• Overall order data
• Line item details
• Tax classes on the line items, detailed taxes on the order, document IDs, and transaction information from a third-party integration like Avalara
• Shipping and fees
• Customs and duties
• Payments and payment transactions
• Discounts
• Split shipments or split payments
• Refunds or necessary customer support for order processing

For example, an order is placed in the eCommerce platform and then goes into NetSuite as part of the integration. Inside of NetSuite, the status of the order might be paid and awaiting fulfillment, in other words a pick and pack process. When the order becomes ready for dispatch, the shipment progress can be updated through a tracking ID until the order is delivered and receives a completed status. All of these steps can be updated in NetSuite and then pushed dynamically through the integration.

The Value of Omnichannel Management and User Associations

Once an order is marked as complete, the status can change in the eCommerce system and enable an extra self-service capability for the end user that allows for requests regarding refunds, replacements, questions, or support. However, it doesn’t stop here as the integration between NetSuite and an eCommerce platform can further incorporate the information below:

• Product catalog data with categories and products
• Accessories, associations to related items, and attributes
• Kitting information and variants
• SKUs, product and manufacturer numbers, and detailed information from the manufacturer or distributor
• Media, like pictures and video
• Product information such as dimensional weight and detailed descriptions
• Pricing data and facts about quotable-only items
• Inventory data

Whenever the items sync from NetSuite, they will likely need to be enriched with marketing content so that they're more presentable from an end user perspective. It's important that the integration capabilities preserve this marketing information that might be unique but still update other areas that are necessary. For example, inventory and pricing data must be updated in real-time, or near real-time, from NetSuite through an efficient and logical update process that doesn't overwrite that rich marketing content. There needs to be a high-fidelity level of integration between the systems so that it's possible to preserve very useful data while also updating a set of discrete fields, like pricing and inventory.

Other sets of information that commonly make sense to include are location data, user data, and custom fields. User data could be pulled from an eCommerce system into NetSuite, which would then associate those users with contacts on a customer record. At the end user’s discretion, their company may be set up so that new users on the eCommerce website can make a request to associate their account with the overall company where they work. The company might have a common domain name or an account number that can be used to make that association request. Then, based on your specific business logic, there may be an approval process for their account administrator to handle within the company. Once their user account is associated with their customer or company record, they would be able to access past order history, make payments on behalf of the company if they're in a financial role, possibly use the purchase on account capability to book items, or purchase items via an eCommerce website that would then get synced back into NetSuite.

In respect to location data that was mentioned before, it's possible to bring in detailed location information around multiple warehouses, distribution centers, or stores and storefronts where applicable. This allows for an omnichannel experience whenever end users are using an eCommerce platform, as they receive rich data about item availability within each of the stores or the most efficient warehouse to ship from. The process may be dynamic, such that the eCommerce system will dynamically select the most efficient shipping location, and potential split shipments or split payments, while also accounting for possible drop shipping or a need to transfer items. In conclusion, this presents a rather extensive capability when integrating with NetSuite.

NetSuite eCommerce Integration Specialists

We recommend working with a partner who has the ability to cater and customize the eCommerce system to NetSuite integration process in a way that matches your specific business needs. The Clarity team certainly welcomes you to reach out and request a complimentary review from our knowledgeable and friendly staff. We’ll be happy to provide you with a needs analysis and proposal for your upcoming project. We can also offer a demo and any additional information that might be needed in order to plan and determine the next steps for your integration project. In the meantime, feel free to click on any of the links on our site to discover more related information. If you have any questions that we haven't fully answered in our resources, click the Ask the Expert link and we'll gladly reply with a detailed and timely response to your question.