What is ERP Integration?

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ERP integration is the connection between an ecommerce store and the ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) system that runs the business, so that products, pricing, inventory, orders, and customers stay in sync between the two. Instead of staff manually copying data back and forth, the storefront and the ERP exchange it automatically, and the online store and back office behave as one system.

For B2B manufacturers and distributors especially, this is where most of the budget and nearly all of the risk in an ecommerce build live. If pricing or stock is wrong because it synced overnight instead of in real time, buyers lose trust and revert to phone and email — so a core decision is setting the sync cadence per data type:

• Near-real-time — pricing, inventory, and order status, because buyers act on them immediately
• Scheduled batch — product master data and other information that doesn’t change by the minute

A stable ERP integration depends less on the ERP brand than on the architecture behind it. The patterns that keep it reliable include:

• Idempotency — replaying a message must never double an order
• Retries with backoff — networks fail mid-transaction; the system recovers without humans
• Monitored error queues — failures surface to a watched queue, not silence
• Defined fallback — known behavior when the ERP is unreachable
• Tested rollback — revert cleanly without losing orders, especially during replatforming

All the major ERPs — SAP (S/4HANA and Business One), Microsoft Dynamics 365, Oracle NetSuite, Infor, Epicor, Visma, Odoo — integrate with platforms like Adobe Commerce. What matters is the data contract: what syncs, in which direction, and how often — whether the connection is custom-built or delivered through an integration platform (iPaaS). This is also why most B2B integrations fail on the architecture, not the ERP — missing idempotency, no error handling, or batch where real-time was needed. Every B2B feature above it, from contract pricing to quoting, is only as reliable as the ERP feed beneath it.