System Integration Overview

In this article we will briefly cover the different ways you can integrate Ucommerce with 3rd party systems and what to consider.

Performance considerations

When dealing with integrations it is always a good idea to get yourself an overview around how the integrations should work before deciding on the model you want to go with. Things that are important factors are:

• How many integrations do I need? (Price updates, Stock updates, product imports, orders export)
• How often should my integrations run? (daily, hourly, every 2 minutes, on demand)
• How much data is being changed?

Be realistic. Sometimes the clients want to update stock and prices for all 100.000 products every minute. This is not going to happen. So talk with your clients and find a sweet spot that suits both them and you.

Web API integrations

You can enable Ucommerce in Web API request and as such, just do your usual CRUD operations directly within a webservice or a scheduled task directly under the website. Everything is in place. You just need to start consuming the APIs you need.

If you are interested in this model, you can read how to add a new webservice.

Integrations outside website

The model that gives you the best performance in terms of dedicated resources is to run your integrations outside the website. This will free resources for your visitors that will get a faster shopping experience as the website is not spending resources on system integration. This model also sets the highest requirement in terms of setup. You can read how to enable the Ucommerce APIs outside webcontext to learn how to do that.