Streamline Magento Order-to-Cash Process with OFBiz

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Use OFBiz to Streamline the Magento Order-to-Cash Process

In the e-commerce marathon, Magento CE and EE appear to be leading the pack. It boasts the highest market share among e-commerce platforms and continues to grow. Google Trends notes that Magento has the highest search volume, and according to a recent post on LinkedIn, an e-commerce platform popularity survey lists Magento as the most popular of the surveyed group.

Magento customers appreciate its high-quality store front options and order processing capabilities. It offers solid architecture for both product-catalog management and order management functionality. However, for some order fulfillment processes it falls short. While Magento takes orders adequately, a third party app is needed to properly manage the order from placement to the final exit from the warehouse and delivery to the customer.

OFBiz Is An Excellent Fulfillment Platform for Magento

With this in mind, we researched the possibility of developing an OFBiz-based  feature to help Magento fulfill orders more efficiently. While there are currently several plug-ins on the market that can be helpful, Apache OFBiz is a scalable Order Management System (OMS) that is perfectly suited to facilitate this. OFBiz has proven to be an excellent fulfillment platform for orders placed not only on native OFBiz e-commerce stores, but also for orders coming from external e-commerce stores such as Magento. In particular, this post focuses on integrating OFBiz as a fulfillment platform for users who are running a Magento storefront.

To migrate sales orders from Magento to OFBiz  for fulfillment purposes, the following items must be synchronized:

  • Store setup
  • Customer data
  • Categories
  • Products
  • Inventory count
  • Creation of sales orders
  • Change in sales orders
  • Orders status
  • Shipment and its tracking number
  • Returns and refunds

Process Flow Diagram for Magento-OFBiz Integration

To better visualize the give and take between both platforms, please refer to the diagram shown below. The flow of information for the push and pull of data in this integration should be maintained as follows:

Magento-OTC-blog-post-3-Aug-04-2023-03-03-13-0604-PM

 

If you have basic storefront functionality in Magento (such as catalog, product, and customer data) then OFBiz will automatically take care of any scheduled orders and other jobs. OFBiz OMS is applicable to, and compatible with all versions of Magento, and can be integrated at any time, even if you are already a Magento user.

Once the automated process for transferring information from either side in the OFBiz-Magento integration is in place, simply set the Magento Configuration information manually and OFBiz will take care of the rest. This means that users don’t need to worry about store setup or importing orders from Magento. Category, product, inventory, and customer setup will be an automated process within OFBiz and will be executed as scheduled. Our team is currently working to bridge the gap between Magento and Order Management. Stay tuned for progress updates, and to learn more about how to streamline the Magento order-to-cash process! For more information about how to leverage the power and flexibility of OFBiz to benefit your business, contact us

 

DATE: Mar 17, 2015
AUTHOR: Arun Patidar
OFBiz Ecommerce, OFBiz