PHP e-commerce site talking to internal database for stock / ordering?

Question

Hi. I'm working on an e-commerce site (either bespoke with PHP, or using Drupal/Ubercart), and I'd like to investigate the site interacting with an internal (filemaker) database we use to manage stock and orders. Currently we manually transfer orders from the web site to our own database, and the site does not check or record changes in stock.

My plan to allow the 2 to interact is as follows:

1. Make the internal database available externaly on a machine with a fixed IP
2. Allow external access from the site only
3. Connect to the internal database using ODBC (or similar)
4. Use simple queries to check stock / record stock changes / record order details

Am I missing something here as this sounds quite straight forward? Is there another solution I should be taking a look at?

Thanks in advance for any help or comments.

Answer 1

Your plan sounds completely straightforward. You might want to consider making sure that end-users can never take an immediate action that updates the backend. Backend stuff should only be modified when a backend user takes an action, i.e. approves of an order. I'm not sure how your preferred e-commerce solutions work, though.