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Shopify integration: pre-release introduction

As many will know, Shopify integration is part of Business Central since version 20.1. So, it has been discussed quite a lot in the Microsoft world. We've made also few experiences with it and now the question is how we can be involved in it with Pimics because one of the targets in e-Commerce is to bring a better customer experience to increase the sales.
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Shopify integration: pre-release introduction
posted 15.07.2022
Martin Opršal
Martin Opršal
Article Author
He is the product manager for Pimics. His responsibility is improvement and usage of the Product Information Management solution.

e-Commere for Business Central

The topic of native e-Commerce solution for Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central has been raised many times and slept again. In one hand there is a solution like Sana Commerce, or DC that present data directly from ERP. In another there are partner integrations and data synchronization to well-known platforms like Magento, Shopware and others.

But none of them is provided by Microsoft. Now we have Shopify integration from Microsoft. We can't stay by side with Pimics. We've been working on analyzing the current integration and finding the limits that we can extend by Pimics.

Pimics - Shopify integration

Our integration is focused on product data, we don't see the reason to touch the other types of integrations like orders. Our goal is to take what is there and extended it, so we don't want to overwrite any process that is designed in the standard integration.

Filters

One of the ways to success sell a product is to help users to find the correct product. Filters are the easiest way; customers can specify there needs and easily find the set of products that can fit. A several insights show that customers need to find a product as fast as possible, otherwise thay are losing drive.

Filters can be defined in Pimics as a feature. When you use inheritance for features you will make sure that all products in the same category have the necessary data, this way you will increase the quality and consistency of the data. In Shopify, features are synchronize to metafields and the rest is just a setting in Shopify.


Shopify-2.png

Shopify-1.png

Product images

Everybody loves pictures and more pictures are always better. Business Central can hold just one picture and is mostly in low resolution. So, in the end the issue is where to store and manage pictures or all digital assets. Pimics brings this possibility and it can not miss in the integration with Shopify.

Because of our DAM, we can also convert pictures between formats, because nobody wants to wait for a high-resolution picture for several seconds.

Rich descriptions

Customers expect the complete product details on the web. In Pimics we have several types of descriptions in rich format (Html) and these texts can be synchronize to Shopify. You can write a specific text for Care instructions, Top features, or Technical Details of a product and place it into different places in the Shopify template. We're back in the PIM functionality because a set of products can have the same care instructions so this text can be manage just once. 

From the technical point of view, we decided to synchronise texts as metafields that can be easily use anyway in the Shopify template. 

Content

Where texts are not enough we use content. I really like this feature in Pimics. There is so much potential to increase customer experience by defining right content.

So what is it? It is combination of different master data like pictures, video, texts, features, etc. into one block (see Product Description on the picture). There is no limitation of templates or Shopify, because templates are defined by users and Pimics generate complete HTML that Shopify just use and also don't worry about your pictures or videos, we place the right link into HTML and it is loaded from DAM, youtube or other source.

Manage data once

Pimics bring the Single Point of Truth concept to the standard integration of Business Central and Shopify. Users will not need to define some data in Business Central and some in Shopify. It saves their time and they can spend it on better product data and increasing customer experience.

 

 

Please, take this information as a first draft or ideas of our integration. The final published version can be different. I expect that all the described things will be released in Pimics 6.1 in August. 

Martin Opršal
Martin Opršal
Article Author
He is the product manager for Pimics. His responsibility is improvement and usage of the Product Information Management solution.
Tags B2C | e-commerce | e-Commerce

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