E-Commerce Driven by Dynamics NAV

There are both ERP and e-commerce systems in the market, all subject to evaluation, comparison, and based on fit-gap rate for your business you will arrive at winners in each category. Yet there is a well known premise - you are better off with one system, not two. All things aside, it is the “single true data source” concept that pays back in the long term, doesn't it? Unfortunately, ERP systems are good at ERP, and e-commerce systems are good at e-commerce. No matter the effort, the best e-commerce will not make a decent ERP, and vice versa. Alright, exceptions might exist in the “vice versa” category, but we're looking and SMB and mid-market software mostly.

So how do you solve this - stay with one system, yet do e-commerce efficiently and use ERP capabilities to full extent?

By concept, ERP system is where you do your operations. For trading, this is where your items, customers and vendors are, this is where you purchase and sell, this is where you do your pricing and costing, and this is where you report from. Keep it that way - there is a million ways of how a good ERP can keep you on track, assist in making the right business decisions, and automate your process. This is what they are for.

If you are using Dynamics NAV, you must have realized you already have about 80% of the data necessary for e-commercing in your Dynamics NAV, and you also have an established process of handling this data. Is there an objective need to introduce another databases for maintaining the same data and reinvent the process? Probably not. Isn't it desirable to just enhance Item cards with pictures, product descriptions, something for SEO, and start selling online right away?

Select Solutions E-Commerce B2B is just that - it takes what you already have in NAV, and makes it sellable at https://your-ecommerce.com. No additional databases to maintain, no mandatory process changes. Install, sync, invite your customers, and start taking orders. To make things pretty, you should structure your Items in categories and extend Item cards with additional data (images, features, translations), all inside the familiar Dynamics NAV which now has fields and pages for e-commerce. For added prettiness, there is also a Wiki-style content management built in on e-commerce site, so that you can also add downloads (e.g. catalogs), publish news, promos, and truly tailor your product appearance. This is of course optional.

As the name implies, E-Commerce B2B is particularly strong in B2B scenarios. Your B2B Customers (the ones you have Customer Cards for) will see their ordering history and current financials (e.g. credit limit usage), will have everything pre-filled on checkout to make it quick, and all the product prices will be “theirs”, as if you entered the transaction on a NAV Sales Order yourself. E-Commerce B2B will also re-use your Dynamics NAV setup like currencies and VAT setup, and any calculation logic is consistent with Dynamics NAV.

E-Commerce B2B does not by concept have any /admin or backend interface, the backend is Microsoft Dynamics NAV.

You can think of https://your-ecommerce.com as a facade to the stock you manage in Dynamics NAV - real-time accurate, and able to sell products.

We are getting asked this a lot, reason being Magento and similar systems are well established, backed by brand names, have a pool of service resources available, some are even free software, and having said that, seem like a choice good for e-commerce.

Yet there are serious advantages why a NAV-dedicated solution like Select Solutions E-Commerce B2B will serve you better.

Reason 1 - They Just Don't Stick Together

Integrations are tough. Not so much technically (there are APIs and SQL) - the toughness is the multitude of slight differences between the systems. Let's look at Magento for the sake of example. In NAV we typically price products “excl. VAT+VAT”, Magento always starts at final price which is “incl. VAT”, VAT on discounts calculation is only vaguely similar. In NAV we have Item Variants, Magento uses Configurable Products. Is that the same? How do they map? Is Invoice a standalone document as in NAV, or just an order stage? The list goes on and on.

In reality, integrations of this kind are usually done “shallow”. The typical one - ok, the product list, pricing, and orders flow back and forth, let's leave the product presentation data to e-commerce, and do invoicing in NAV. Then let's sort out which system is allowed to “create new” what, where the codes will originate, what is allowed and forbidden in each of the system etc.

Reason 2 - Breaks Single True Data Source

And becauce of #1, we have arrived at having two product catalogs, two lists of orders with different supposed flows, no quick end-to-end drill down on what has happened to a transaction, and you may even need to report based on two systems.

We cannot stress enough how important this is at business management level. While we may have a pretty and somewhat integrated e-commerce in place, we have defeated the purpose of ERP - which is THE source of operational business data, THE place to register transactions, and THE source of truth for business reports.

We truly believe in better business by proper process organization and well-organized data, and the “single true data source” concept is one of the most important ones here, definitely not to be traded for a handful of fancy e-commerce features. You can add features as necessary, but having “multiple truths” is not easily fixable.

Reason 3 - There's No Good B2B

Nearly all of well-known e-commerce platforms are for B2C model primarily. They excel at being pretty and SEO-optimized, and with those systems you are supposed to achieve general market visibility, build consumer trust, somewhat push towards spontaneous buys, and make it all a pleasant experience. They are digital analogs of high street boutiques. If that's what you're after, we do in fact recommend looking at Magento - a great system for the purpose.

On the downside, just see what happens if you throw your 15'000 (average among our customers) items on a stock Magento installation. How about contract pricing? How about the ability to order quickly and actually use it as an ordering tool, not a consumer webshop? It's just not there, never mind the ability to nicely orchestrate with ERP like Dynamics NAV.

In fact we have not yet stumbled upon a good publicly available B2B-oriented e-commerce platform. If you know of one, please let us know, we'll appreciate.