We are a small epicor user. We acquired a small distribution only company and we are trying to put them on epicor to bring the companies closer together for inventory, manufacturing and accounting needs. They have a simple erp software that has a powerful but affordable ecommerce site. There solution allows the customer to see other the site inventory and the customer can choose what site to ship if from based on the inventory they can see in the checkout cart. It also allows the customer to search for parts, download statement, invoice, etc. They get about 30 small orders every day.
We are looking at ECC basic/advanced and was looking for other ecommerce solutions that others are using. The customer would need to be able to see the inventory from all the sites, order from other site, order history, there pricing, etc. I have searched the user group but don’t see many alternatives to ECC. I have read that some companies have integrated using a in house solutions.
I have implemented two in house custom built everything integrated website and I can confidently say that if your workflows for sales is straightforward, you’d be better served using a plug and play solution if possible. There are many, many complexities with an e commerce bi-directional integrated website to your erp and if you don’t have the right people or desire to make that a relatively full time job, you’d be doing yourself a favor to purchase something that is built for it
That said, I have not use ECC. Our scenario is unique, but perhaps yours is not. If you sell to customers and they are the ones who will log in to place the order, it’s probably a good fit to consider.
Simon! This is what I am hoping happens, but so far it has been Epicor buying companies that do ecommerce or configurators or document management or BI and then pushing those solutions instead of working with leading third parties to develop a working integration…
It always disappoints me when I go to some third party or disruptive solution provider and they have a long list of Partner logos and the famous Abbott Laboratories E is missing.
That’s what I am saying!!! Maybe we are missing something, but I feel like it’s untapped revenue for them that they are missing by leaving out that E.
That’s an understatement… But there may be more to it, like resourcing. Managing development of a new UI …Existing commitments to a roadmap yada yada yada
Very easy to do when their market is midsized manufacturers (among other midsized industries).
Would love to see their market research about how easy it is for these manufacturers to afford what is necessary to make use of these tools to build the house. I think someone forgot that core competencies of manufacturers usually isn’t app development or managing integrations…
If only Epicor took that burden on themselves (instead of giving it to us) and worked with these third parties to build the integrations we long for… Maybe they’d find that the revenue genreated from having these integrations offsets the financial burden it took to develop and manage these integrations.
In other words, I think that selling an ERP system offering integrations with leading third party systems would be a benefit and increase Epicor’s sales because it differentiates them from other ERP systems that don’t have these integrations.
Whereas right now they can only say, we’ll give you a
even though you are a manufacturer of something completely unrelated to houses. Good luck!
But I don’t know the first thing about this type of business (creating and managing integrations) or how it would affect Epicor’s bottom line- which is what any new decision ultimately comes down to.
Would love to hear the thoughts of someone that does.
Well… you should come to insights to hear more about Automation Studio (Insights Sneak Peek... to learn more, come to Insights 2022) as that is one of the use cases for this new tool. Watch the video… it is a very simple use case, but it goes well beyond what you can see here. Cant really tell you more until Insights when it is officially announced.
We are a manufacturer & distributor on Epicor 10.2. We transitioned our Ecommerce site to ECC in our original implementation and STRUGGLED! We then discovered parttrap, implemented in June 2021 and have been very pleased with the platform. Here is a little vidoe our team put together describing our experience. Our site is open to B2C, so you are welcome to take a look at store.csidesigns.com to get a sense of our progress.
Sorry for replying late to this but we are using Shopify for selling our parts. We had ebridge (now part of jitterbit) setup the interface. We pushed them to update to using the REST interface but they have an older interface that installs the glue on your SQL server.
Shopify supports 4 locations to ship from with their basic license. For our setup, the parts and inventory sync with Shopify. Orders and order acknowledgments also get synced.
We decided to avoid clearing credits cards in Epicor so just let Shopify do it. This avoids all the compliance issues with the bank.
Jitterbit/eBridge already had an interface to the cloud hosted version of Epicor using REST but we are on a 3rd party hosting provider. For some reason they needed to modify their interface to work with ours.
This works pretty well. I get a notification from Shopify directly when an order is created but that is superfluous because it seems to work well. I would just warn you not to expect a whole lot of customization on Shopify unless you get someone who knows their themes and can spend the time to adjust. For us, it gave us a fairly quick and solid way to sell our parts without having to invest the HR to build an e-commerce site and manage it.
I would suggest that when you get into a meeting with a VP that insists that the site “works just like XYZ manufacture’s site” that they be reminded that this supplier has a full time department or has outsourced their part sales to a professional ecommerce provider. Just get a quote for one of those and I bet the CEO will have trouble seeing the potential revenue to justify this.
For me, there is very little to monitor. As long as the Epicor REST interface is functioning then this works. Our end user has all the tools to monitor Jitterbit and Shopify for problems. I have not had a query since we went live last Fall.
Just be aware that we only have 4-5 part orders a month so this may be too small scale for what you company wants. We went the route of looking at ECC and my predecessor built a custom interface to save money but, when he left, no one could troubleshoot it. This gives us an open solution without a pile of money per month. If your company figures you could make $100K a year then maybe a more custom interface could be justified but this gives us a quick on ramp without a pile of commitment.
