Hello all - has anyone integrated Magento with their Epicor system for automated processes, via their website?
If so, words of wisdom or red flags we should consider when trying to implement?
What are you using to integrate the two systems? API or a 3rd Party Connector.
I believe the plan is to use an API connector - the website team has asked for Epicorâs API / REST documentation, so that is my assumption.
Epicor Commerce Connect is a module you can enable that integrates with Magento. It runs a Task on your Task Agent and it honors your External Company settings and it will send data to your Magento and Magento can send data back.
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Thank you, because âI donât know what I donât knowâ, is ECC required for Magento to integrate with Magento to push data in and pull data back out to the website?
Additionally, if ânoâ, are there additional benefits that should be considered for considering ECC?
It is not required you can do it via your own ETL. However, you should look into it⌠It may have everything you need with 0 code.
It can be done without ECC. ECC is a bit of a shortcut, but personally, I
find it a bit expensive for what it actually offers⌠Just my opinion.
On a side not, I am a big fan of your company. My home is littered with
your fixtures!
Thatâs great to hear, I am also a fan of it, HA! Seriously, itâs a great company to work for, and a person canât beat the benefit of having the product in their home! 
Thank you for you insight on ECC.
Iâve done it twice now.
ECC makes sense if you donât already have a website and donât want the hassle of managing it all, because itâs a one-stop solution, and Epicor has a big team making sure it does what it does. There is a certain amount of lock-in, because it uses a heavily customised version of Magento, and that also means you canât retrofit ECC to a Magento website that already exists (unless anythingâs changed very recently).
If you do roll your own integration, the only real things to be aware of are that thereâs no short-cut for having teams involved who really know Magento and really know Epicor (rarely theyâll be the same teams), because the two platforms donât handle some key things the same. And in my experience, picking the Magento team makes a huge difference to both the project and the outcome.
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Thank you Daryl, I appreciate the insight.
Daryl, I meant to ask - would you be open to a call from myself and our two Epicor Super Users to pick your brain on things we should think of ahead of time? We are clueless when it comes to this, the decision was made without our input, so we are kind of trying to catch up, on an integration we know nothing about.
Sure, no problem. Iâm always interested to catch up on anyone elseâs experience anyway.
Oh, thank you so much! Could you share your email information for me to send some times to try and coordinate? You are more than welcome to email me at mbrown@vtforge.com, with your contact info.
Thank you again!
^THIS. My previous employer tried to âroll their ownâ without ECC and it didnât work well as they didnât want to pay for enough staff who knew Epicor and Magento to get a successful integration.
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Magento is the easy part. I wrote an integration that handled multiple ecommerce platforms, and Magento and Commerce Cloud were by far the easiest to work with because they use Swagger. The majority of the work was learning how to efficiently create customers, orders, and deposits in Epicor. (Which goes against Epicorâs suggestion to put every order under a single customer called âWeb Customerâ or something, but thatâs how the company wanted it.) The Epicor side involved about fifteen or twenty separate REST services. I had a previous version to crib from, but it was an unmaintainable bug-ridden mess and I ended up rewriting it. I wouldnât trust anyone to do this who doesnât already have extensive experience with Epicor.
At one point we were using four different ecom platforms abstracted behind a common interface. Once I had the Epicor side down, it would take about a week to integrate a new platform if they used Swagger and about a month if they didnât. I still have all the code, but I donât own it. I wonder if I could convince my previous employer to license or sell it to meâŚ
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Magento is the easy part for people who know Magento, while Epicor is the easy part for people who know Epicor!
This is why the team set-up is SO important, and that it really is a team, not one side thinking they know it all. Like you, I definitely wouldnât trust anyone who said they could handle this without Epicor experience involved, but the same applies to the Magento end as soon as itâs a non-trivial integration.
My preferred solution, rather than the multiple REST services, in Epicor, is to expose only dedicated Epicor Functions. That way you can keep the Epicor logic within Epicor, where people who know Epicor can maintain it, and you get the increased security of limited REST access as well.
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I came across this thread while looking for recommendations on how to connect Epicor (Functions + REST) and Magento (REST).
Here are some of the features we are currently working on :
- Updating Magento products inventory (from Epicor to Magento)
- Creating ERP orders (from Magento to Epicor)
- Creating Magento shipments (from Epicor to Magento)
We are having a hard time figuring out where to store ID references (in Epicor? in Magento? in both?).
For the products inventory, we created a Magento custom attribute âerp_product_idâ, which stores the Epicor PartNum. This looks fine, although it requires to GET every product from Magento, then for each product, GET the stock from Epicor and UPDATE Magento product.
For the Magento shipments, it seems like a real puzzle. Magento REST order shipping endpoint requires to pass the IDs of the Magento order lines to ship. We never thought of storing each Magento order line ID into a user defined ERP field. Is there another recommended way to handle Epicor => Magento shipments?