Plan your commerce integrations

List the applications involved in a product becoming available, an order being accepted, stock being allocated and a purchase being fulfilled. Include ERP, product information, warehouse, store, payment and carrier systems where they are part of your operation.

For every connection, identify the business outcome it enables. This helps distinguish a necessary integration from a duplicate data feed and makes ownership easier to assign. Record system versions and partner dependencies for technical discovery.

Choose the authoritative source for each data domain and, where needed, each field. Product descriptions might follow a different approval process from selling prices or stock availability. Avoid designs in which multiple systems can silently overwrite the same information.

Agree how products, variants, locations, orders and customers are identified across applications. Maintain explicit mappings where identifiers differ. Decide how merges, deletions, retired products and closed locations are represented so that old records do not reappear unexpectedly.

For each flow, document required fields, allowed values, units, timestamps and lifecycle states. Include examples that represent your actual business: an order with multiple lines, a price change with an effective date or a stock adjustment at a specific location.

Choose a timing requirement based on the customer and operational consequence of delay. Some workflows need immediate confirmation; others can tolerate scheduled updates. Confirm the supported interfaces and delivery behavior with the relevant product teams rather than assuming that every event is available.

Assume that connections can time out, updates can arrive more than once and downstream systems can be unavailable. Agree how duplicate processing is prevented, which failures can be retried and which require review. Protect business outcomes such as charging a customer or allocating the same stock twice.

Create a reconciliation method independent of the happy path. A connection can appear healthy while records are missing or inconsistent. Define how teams discover a mismatch, inspect the affected records and repair the state safely.

Grant access according to the actions each integration needs and establish an approved process for managing credentials. Record who can change a connection, inspect sensitive information or replay an update. Confirm the applicable product controls and organizational policies during discovery.

Define useful monitoring around business events: missing orders, delayed stock updates or rejected product records. Assign an escalation path that includes both sides of the connection. Clarify who maintains the integration when either application changes.

Test from the initiating action through to the receiving system and the operational outcome. Include duplicate updates, unavailable services, invalid records and changes that arrive in an unexpected order. Verify that recovery produces the intended final state.

Keep a versioned record of interfaces, mappings, examples and acceptance results. Agree how configuration is promoted, how changes are reversed and who confirms readiness. Revisit the integration inventory when new stores, channels or product capabilities are added.