SAP Commerce Integration

SAP Commerce Cloud solution does not live in a vacuum. Integration or extensibility can be required just about anywhere–whether it's importing the latest pricing data, to calling a service to calculate loyalty points for a product or notifying a user when a product comes back in stock. 

The types of integrations can vary, such as payment, shipping, reviews or may require  connecting to other SAP solutions like SAP Customer Data Cloud or SAP S/4HANA. With SAP Commerce Cloud being a Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) solution, you have many options for extending and integrating your solution.

The SAP Commerce Cloud, integration extension pack delivers out-of-the-box solutions to integrate SAP Commerce Cloud with S/4HANA, ERP, CRM, and a range of applications such as SAP Marketing Cloud or SAP Sales Cloud. These integration solutions enable you to quickly get an SAP Commerce Cloud solution up and running that capitalizes on existing master data platforms without significant customization overhead.

SAP Commerce's Integration API Module exposes a set of interfaces used for data integration with SAP Commerce. Use the Integration API module to connect services to send data to, or receive data from, SAP Commerce.

The Integration API module simplifies data integration with SAP Commerce using Integration Objects. These objects are used in the payload that is sent or received from SAP Commerce to define data types. Inbound and outbound integration objects are described in this guide.

It is important to remember for an integration to work, both the inbound and outbound services need to exist. An integration flow may be available in SAP Integration Suite, but the corresponding inbound or outbound service might not be delivered until the next Commerce Cloud Integration Extension Pack release.

Extensibility

If you're not satisfied with the pre-built integrations, you can create your own custom Integration Objects as per of the SAP recommended product documentation. You can then use these custom Integration Objects by making them available as part of an integration API. You can also customize your SAP Integration Flows (iFlow) to transform and load your data in the required format.

 

Scalability

The use of Integration Objects and integration APIs combined with SAP Integration Suite allows for a fully scalable integration solution. Both SAP Commerce Cloud and SAP Integration Suite provide scalability features. If you are noticing performance issues, try to narrow down to either SAP Commerce Cloud or the SAP Integration Suite and open a Support ticket.

 

Audit and Control

As mentioned above, monitoring and control of the odata services can be done in SAP Commerce Cloud (for example, Inbound). In addition, the logging of messages can be configured in SAP Integration Suite. Authentication and authorization to both SAP Commerce Cloud and SAP Integration Suite can be configured through multiple ways. Please see the respective product documentation.

 

Testability

You can easily test the various flows created in SAP Integration Suite as well as through the SAP Commerce Cloud back-office application. If you're looking to isolate the testing and monitoring to the inbound/outbound services in SAP Comemrce Cloud.

 

Ease of Deployment

You need to connect both SAP Commerce Cloud and SAP Integration Suite as well as configure the iFlows you'll be needing. Please consult the documentation for your specific integration to determine how to configure.

 

Reliability

The integration is decoupled from the front-end, so if your processing nodes or SAP Integration Suite instances go down, your SAP Commerce storefronts will continue to operate, though your data will no longer be refreshed.

 

Stability

Unexpected results are logged. You can review both the integration flows in SAP Integration Suite and the messages that are being sent back and forth, to determine where the issue occurs. You can also use the SAP Commerce Cloud Backoffice UI Tool to monitor and troubleshoot issues.