Integrate Ecommerce Stack Recipe
This document guides you through integrating systems in your ecommerce stack with Medusa.
Overview
Integrating third-party systems, such as ERP or a CMS, into your ecommerce stack can be challenging. It requires:
- Establishing connections with the different systems based on each of their APIs.
- Building flows that span across multiple systems.
- Maintaining data consistency and syncing between your systems.
Medusa’s architecture and functionalities allow you to integrate third-party systems and build flows around them. It also provides error-handling mechanisms and webhook capabilities that prevent data inconsistency between your systems.
Connect to External Systems with Services
Medusa’s Services let you implement a client that connects and performs functionalities with your third-party system. You can then use the service to connect to your third-party system in other resources, such as a Workflow or an API Route.
This increases the maintainability of your integration as it’s all implemented within the service. If the external system makes any changes to its APIs, you only need to make changes within the service.
Learn how to create a service in Medusa.
Example: Create a service for an ERP system
Build Flows Across Systems
With Medusa’s workflows, you can build flows with steps that may perform actions on different systems. For example, you can create a workflow that updates the product’s details in integrated systems like ERPs, WMSs, and CMSs.
Workflows can be executed from anywhere. So, taking the workflow described in the above example, you can listen to the product.updated event using a Subscriber and execute the workflow whenever the event is triggered.
Workflows guarantee data consistency through their compensation feature. You can provide a compensation function to steps that roll back the actions of that step. Then, if an error occurs in any step, the actions of previous steps are rolled back using the compensation function.
Learn more about Workflows and how to create them.
Example: Update products across systems with workflows
Create Webhook Listeners
You can provide webhook listeners that your external systems call when their data is updated. This lets you synchronize data between your systems. Webhook listeners can be created in Medusa using API Routes.
For example, suppose an administrator changes the product data in the ERP system. In that case, the system sends a request to the webhook you define in Medusa, which updates the product data in Medusa.
Learn how to create an API Route in Medusa.
Example: Create a webhook listener for ERP changes
Additional Development
You can find other resources for your ecommerce development in the Medusa Development section of this documentation.