Many eBusiness entities have seasonal products. Bakeries make Easter Bunny cakes, Easter eggs, Christmas cakes which are only sold over a particular time period in a year. Gift Shops stock seasonally themed gifts which are also sold over a particular time period or are sold throughout the year but in varying prices.
In an ideal e-business scenario product details are maintained in the back office ERP system but the visibility or the price variation of the product needs to be maintained at the online store front as well.
You may want to sell a product on your eCommerce store only during the winter/summer season or on a particular occasion. Also as per your specific business model you might want to sell a product at a discounted price on the occasion of Thanks Giving/Black Friday and at the general price at other times of the year.
So the two challenges faced in running an e Business with seasonal products are :
1) Maintaining the visibility of the seasonal products at the online store front.
2) Maintaining the discounted prices of the product through different times of the year in the online store.
Many eCommerce platforms e.g. Magento provides option to choose if the product would be visible at the store front. For example in Magento if “Catalog, Search” is selected as an option from the Dropdown list for “Visibility”, the product would be visible at the front end. But in back office ERP systems e.g. SAP Business One, since there are no provisions for maintaining such minute web details it becomes difficult to maintain same data in the two systems.
eCommerce platforms e.g. Magento provides the facility to maintain discounted prices for a product over a particular time period. In Magento, apart from the regular price one can set a “Special Price” and mention the availability dates within which the product would be available at the discounted price at the Magento Storefront. In back office ERP systems e.g. SAP Business One, also there are provisions to maintain discounted prices for a particular time period through “Period Discount” and mention the availability dates as well. But although these data for products can be maintained in both the systems, due to the disparity of the architecture and database structure of the systems it is difficult to sync the Period Discount set in SAP Business One to the Magento Storefront.
SBOeConnect is a unique integration solution that can streamline your eBusiness integrating your Magento store and your SAP Business One ERP system. SBOeConnect can resolve the above challenges in the following ways:
1) SBOeConnect bidirectionally updates product data between Magento and SAP Business One. Through a simple checkbox the Product Visibility of the Magento Storefront can be controlled through SAP Business One ERP. If the checkbox ticked off, the product will not be visible in Magento Front End, if ticked on; the product will be available in Catalog as well as in Search for the eCommerce Customers.
2) As Mentioned, SAP Business One has provision to maintain period discounts for products. Magento also provides the scope to provide a Special price over a particular period of time. SBOeConnect integrates period discounts already set in SAP Business One to Magento as Special price in fully automated manner.
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