Able Commerce POS Data Merge

Question

We are building an AbleCommerce 7 web store and trying to integrate it with an existing point-of-sale system. The product inventory will be shared between a phyical store and a web store so we will need to periodically update quantity on hand for each product to keep the POS and the web store as close to in synch as possible to avoid over selling product in either location. The POS system does have an scheduled export that will run every hour.

My question is, has anyone had any experience with synchronizing data with an Able Commerce 7 web store and would you have any advice on an approach?

Here are the approaches that we are currently considering:

1. Grab exported product data from the POS system and determine which products need to be updated. Make calls to a custom-built web service residing on the server with AbleCommerce to call AbleCommerce APIs and update the web store appropriately.
2. Able Commerce does have a Data Port utility that can import/export web store data via the Able Commerce XML format. This would provide all of the merging logic but there doesn't appear to be a way to programmatically kick off the merge process. Their utility is a compiled Windows application. There is no command-line interface that we are aware of. The Data Port utility calls an ASHX handler on the server.
3. Take an approach similar to #1 above but attempt to use the Data Port ASHX handler to update the products instead of using our own custom web service. Currently there is no documentation for interfacing with the ASHX handler that we are aware of.

Thanks, Brian

Answer 1

I've done this with POS software. It wasn't AbleCommerce, but retail sales and POS software is generic enough (no vendor wants to tell prospects that "you need to operate differently") that it might work.

Sales -> Inventory

Figure out how to tap into the Data Port for near-real-time sales info. I fed this to a Message-Queue-By-DBMS-Table mechanism that was polled and flushed every 30 seconds to update inventory. There are several threads here that discuss MQ via dbms tables.

Inventory -> Sales

Usually there is a little more slack here - otherwise you get into interesting issues about QC inspection failures, in-transit, quantity validation at receiving, etc. But however it's done, you will have a mechanism for events occurring as new on-hand inventory becomes available. Just do the reverse of the first process. A QOH change event causes a message to be queued for a near-real-time polling app to update the POS.

I actually used a single queue table in MSSQL with a column for messagetype and XML for the message payload.

It ends up being simpler than the description might sound. Let me know if you want info offline.

Answer 2

We've set this up between AbleCommerce and an MAS system. We entered the products into the AbleCommerce system and then created a process to push the inventory, price, and cost information from the MAS system into the ProductVariants table.

The one issue we ran into is that no records exist in the ProductVariants table until you make a change to the variants data. So, we had to write a Stored Procedure to automatically populate the ProductVariants table so that we could do the sync.