Connect Magento to Business Management Software via soap

Question

I am looking to link Magento to our in-house Business Management Software (Inventory, Financials, Customer Accounts etc). I would like both systems to talk to each other. I know our Business Management Software has a Soap service that allows for this type of integration. I need our system to update after an order has been placed on Magento. I would need it to the customer account (if it's a new customer), create an order and post a payment (receipt) to the customer's account.

I don't really think it would be important to do it after every order but could probably set up a cron to check for new orders every 15/30 minutes and do it then?

How difficult would it be to achieve this? Would it be expensive?

Answer 1

Magento comes per default with a SOAP API (SOAP v1, SOAPv 2, SOAP v2 with WS-I).

There are various methods for retrieving order and customer details:

To retrieve a list of new orders (for example) after a certain date, you can use salesOrderList and afterwards salesOrderInfo to retrieve specific order details.

For the customers it's the same: Retrieve a list of customers with the list method, and then get specific customer details with the info method.

All you have to do is to set up a SOAP API user and SOAP API role which is used to access this data.

How difficult would it be to achieve this?

Using the standard methods like mentioned above is pretty straight forward. From experience I know most of the time is spent debugging why a specific SOAP call does not work which is mostly a server issue.

Would it be expensive?

As I don't know how your Business Management Software is able to connect via SOAP: no idea.