Magento with external datasource

Question

I'm a .Net developer, I focus mainly on the system logic rather than UI stuff, and I actually know zero about PHP so please excuse any ignorance!

We are looking at using a marketing/SEO/design agency to aid us in launching a website, and they use Magento. However we have a completely bespoke order fulfilment system, which already exists and is used to co-ordinate our orders between eBay, Amazon, google shopping etc, and orders from our own website (which may or may not end up being Magento driven) would need to feed into this system.

I'm happy to expose service endpoints to it, probably using WCF, does anybody know how possible it would be to adjust Magento so that all the data it uses comes from/goes to this service endpoint instead?

I suppose all I'm really meaning is that it would need to:

a) use a datafeed for products and stock levels b) send orders to us

We would otherwise just write our own bespoke storefront probably using ASP.Net MVC.

Answer 1

Magento has numerous systems and facilitate for updating products and stock levels from external sources on a scheduled basis. Magento also has a robust event system such that listeners can be setup to send out information instantly after an order's been placed. If you know what you're doing, this is an average task, and the kind of thing Magento was made for. Additionally, Magento has an extension marketplace, and it wouldn't surprise me to find out there are commercial extensions to automate handling exactly your situation.

The question you want to be asking is, has this marketing/SEO/design done this before.