Client Food importer
Industry Wholesale & direct-to-consumer
Services ERP integration · E-commerce · Automation
A store that runs itself
The ERP is the single source of truth: catalog, per-channel prices, stock, customers and orders flow both ways on their own. The store sells without adding an hour of work to anyone.
0
manual entries in the store
0
products syncing on their own
0
price lists per channel
0
warehouses with live stock
The problem
An importer and distributor of food-service products that sells both to end consumers and to wholesalers, distributors and franchises. The whole operation —catalog, prices, stock, customers— lives in their ERP.
The online store ran on a separate track: every new product, every price change and every web order meant duplicate manual entry. With 7 different price lists per customer type and stock spread across 6 warehouses, keeping the store up to date by hand was unmanageable and error-prone.
The bar for the project was not a good-looking catalog. It was a store that could run every day without anyone at the company tending to it: if selling online adds admin work, the channel doesn't survive.
The solution
01The ERP as the single source of truth
A bespoke PHP plugin connects WooCommerce to the ERP over SOAP. The full catalog —972 products, 65 categories, 378 brands— syncs incrementally every 15 minutes, with a daily full pass and checksums so nothing unchanged is reprocessed. Several of the services we needed didn't exist on the ERP side, and there was no documentation: we mapped its real behavior, requested what was missing and worked around what never arrived.
02Prices and stock per channel, with no judgment calls in between
The 7 price lists and the stock of all 6 warehouses update every 5 minutes. Each wholesale customer sees the prices of the list assigned to them in the ERP, with no one entering or double-checking them. Manual price editing in the store is deliberately locked: if a number can be edited in two places, sooner or later the two disagree.
03The whole order, end to end
On checkout the system charges through the online payment provider, quotes shipping with the carrier and creates the customer and the order directly in the ERP, including Argentine tax data (CUIT/CUIL, VAT status) and automatic warehouse assignment based on the payment method. Order statuses flow back from the ERP to the store every 5 minutes, so the buyer watches their purchase move without anyone writing an email.
04Unattended by design
An external cron, independent from site traffic, drives the syncs. Retries with exponential backoff, automatic re-authentication when the SOAP session expires, and an activity log with 30 days of history available from the admin panel. Order statuses were verified with 51 automated checks, zero failures, without touching the production ERP.
05Getting the operation ready, not just the software
Selling online requires data that wholesale never needed: without per-product weight and dimensions there is no shipping quote, and no amount of development solves that for you. Part of the job was spotting those gaps early, surveying them and walking the client through closing them — development is usually ready before the operation is.
Results
- The store is live and selling: the payment clears and the order shows up in the ERP on its own, with its customer and tax details.
- Nobody enters anything twice. Catalog, prices and stock are entered exactly once: in the ERP.
- 972 products, 65 categories and 378 brands synced automatically.
- 7 price lists refreshed every 5 minutes, with per-customer B2B pricing.
- Stock from 6 warehouses reflected in the store every 5 minutes.
- Payment and shipping wired into the same flow: the purchase completes with no involvement from the company.