E-commerce front-office for existing back-office

Hi there,

I currently have a in-house custom-built back-office platform (with a backend and a frontend) on which human operators can manually manage the commerce, products, orders, payment, shipment, etc.

It’s currently used to sell “online” via WhatsApp, chat and phone: customers talk to a sale agent which in turn manually creates orders using this platform.

I’d like to open an e-commerce to allow clients to self-buy the same products without talking to an agent, that is, a classic e-commerce website.

I need some sort of integration between this new e-commerce platform and the back office we’re already using.

Ideally, the new e-commerce platform should work only as a front-office, while retrieving and writing data to the existing back office.

Would it be feasible with OpenCart usino hooks, APIs or something else?

Thank you very much!

Hi, to integrate your in-house custom-built back-office platform with ecommerce product database,
If your back-office platform supports REST API, process of updating product database can be scheduled as cron jobs.

SohBH wrote: ↑

Fri Sep 08, 2023 4:41 pm

Hi, to integrate your in-house custom-built back-office platform with ecommerce product database,
If your back-office platform supports REST API, process of updating product database can be scheduled as cron jobs.

Hi, thank you for your answer!

What I actually would like to build, is an interface by which OpenCart can read and write directly to my back office in real-time, without having a duplicate database that needs to be synched with back office periodically.

Ideally, it should be something that sits between opencart’s front-end and opencart’s backend (that’s why I think about hooks) and when OC code tries to read or write to its own DB, the hook instead stops this requests and routes the same request to my back office, which should be able to reply with the same data format that OC expects.

This is just an idea and I don’t know if it’s feasible. Maybe there are other ways to achieve this.

If you have API endpoint readily available within your back-office platform, then it becomes feasible to retrieve data from your back-office and display it on website.

SohBH wrote: ↑

Fri Sep 08, 2023 7:54 pm

If you have API endpoint readily available within your back-office platform, then it becomes feasible to retrieve data from your back-office and display it on website.

Let’s say I have back-office’s APIs already available.

Would it be possibile to integrate them with OpenCart?

If yes, how?

Thank you very much

OpenCart including product management, category, customer accounts, shopping cart, wishlists, and more. You are going to replicate the full functionality of OpenCart within your back-office API.

This integration can be done if your back office can produce a product inventory export and can accept order imports.
With this module
https://www.opencart.com/index.php?rout ... n_id=44615
you can import products in an Opencart store and set a cron job to synchronise the quantities.
Order export from the website and import to your back office can be done with a custom script according to your back office's specifications.