Saturday, September 24, 2011

Case Study: Connect Magento with ChannelAdvisor

Hello,

This blog is again on different topic. It will not have single line of code. It's a case study on Synchronizing magento with leading eCommerce platforms.

Magento is very popular eCommerce platform widely used across the globe. eBay is acquiring magento and magento framework will be core part of eBay soon. eBay, Magento and Paypal are going to launch new eCommerce platform called xCommerce.

Sometimes it would be difficult to manage everything for those who sell their stuff online and using Magento and other sites like eBay and Amaozn. Because you have magento orders in magento admin. You can view eBay orders in eBay seller account and same way for Amazon orders. So seller have to process all the orders at different place. Same way it would be difficult to manage inventory.

To resolve this problems, magento should be synchronized with other platforms so that all the process like inventory management and order processing can be done at one place. Since last few months, I am working Magento synchronization with those platforms and I would like to share that experience here as a case study.

So this blog is about ChannelAdvisor

ChannelAdvisor provides you multiple channel for eBay and Amazon. ChannelAdvisor provides set of API to access ChhanelAdvisor account from outside. Those API can be used  synchronize it with Magento.

Inventory API

Inventory API is used to manage inventory. It gives various functions like

-Add item
-Delete item
-Update item
-Set quantity
-Set price and much more.

And it provides ability to send set of attributes for products so that all the magento attributes can be sent to CA. So basically on magento we need to set a cron job which runs every specified time interval and send updates in inventory to CA.

Order API


It gives an order api using which we can retrieve order details and using those details we can insert those orders in magento via code and process them in admin. You can retrieve orders based on specific date range. Also various filters can be applied like get all the pending orders, get all unshipped orders etc. We can control detail level of information. If you want all the information about order or only selected information, this can be controlled in API. Same way one can control number of orders returned by API. If you specify 100 orders, it will return information about 100 orders in one API call. It also gives you full details about customer, so that can be used in Magento to create customer and assign that order to him. Orders can be synchronized by setting a cron job in magento which runs on specified time interval and fetch those orders and create them in Magento.

Also after processing orders tracking information can be sent back to ChannelAdvisor using order API.

This makes complete integration of CA with Magento.

I hope this post helps you and if you are looking for such solution let me know.

Thanks,

5 comments:

  1. hello hiren's

    I have a project in which client want to connect x-cart with channel adviser. all the process should work similar to project you have done to connect magento-CA. I am asp.net developer could you help me to give overview that how can I done my job.
    Thanks
    aman

    ReplyDelete
  2. Well I am not sure about xCart because I have not worked with it but first thing you need to check is how xcart handles product updates. Once you figure out that you can go writing logic for cron script.

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  3. Channel Advisor recently contracted CloudConversion to build an automated sync from Magento to Channel Advisor and vice-versa.
    They did a pretty bad job and if anyone else has a working solution we would be very interested in hearing about it.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Hi Stephen,

      We have a working solution. Please contact me on my mail id hdave10@gmail.com and we can discuss further.

      Delete
    2. Stephen,

      Would you care to share why you think they did a pretty bad job?
      We are considering CA and they told us they have an automated sync that's used by hundreds of satisfied customers.

      Any help or advice would be much appreciated.

      Delete