Magento Integration with ERP and Dynamic Pricing

Question

First, a little background ...

I work for a software company that is VAR for ERP. This ERP dynamically calculates prices for products based on a hierarchical set of rules. Depending on the client configuration, these rules can be very complex. This is so for our client.

Our client is trying to integrate this ERP into the Magento eCommerce platform. A component of this integration is the display of a custom price.

Magento developer asks to export price information in a flat file. Listing customer, product, minimum quantity and price. Providing this information is a very lengthy process due to all the necessary complex calculations. So long that it is not practical for the planned periodic export.

Usually, when we integrate into other e-commerce platforms, we provide a web service that can call ERP and return pricing information as needed. If for any reason the call fails, they will set the default price by default and inform the user.

Now to the question ...

We get a pushback from Magento developer when dynamically calculating the price using this method. Their reasons for this are vague and alarming - given that this is pretty standard for our other e-commerce solutions.

We have no specific experience with Magento, but is it difficult to implement? I understand that the possibility of an inaccessible web service will mean that users will not receive their specific price, but we have never encountered such resistance from the side of an e-commerce developer. Should our customer be bothered?

Thanks for any insight you can provide ...

Answer 1

Magento pricing is pretty tough to give them the amount of customization they have already written for the framework. Thus, the default installation of Magento will not push prices from the web service on demand per customer.

Ultimately, however, this is just code. An experienced Magento developer should be able to replace pricing methods with products called your web service and determine the price for this customer. Keep in mind that this is not trivial integration, and I expect to see some problems with cart prices and product reordering.

Hope you get an idea.

Thanks Joe