Automated dropship integration with a costume wholesaler's API

The challenge

A UK fancy-dress retailer sold costumes supplied on a dropship basis by a large costume wholesaler. The online store's catalogue had to match the wholesaler's, and every customer order had to reach the supplier for dispatch.

The retailer's UK web agency asked us to automate both directions: bring the wholesaler's categories, products and options into the store, keep them updated, and push new customer orders to the supplier automatically. The wholesaler exposed SOAP web services with its own XML order format, and the work had to be done without disrupting the live store.

What we did

• Catalogue import. We built a custom module that imports categories, products and product options from the wholesaler's data feed, mapping colour and size options to store attributes. The supplier's recommended retail price is used as the store price.
• Scheduled updates. Import and update routines run from cron URLs, so product data refreshes on a schedule without anyone logging in to the admin.
• Automatic order submission. New customer orders are sent to the wholesaler through its SubmitOrder web service. We worked directly with the wholesaler's development team to confirm the XML format and tested against their staging order service before switching to live endpoints.
• Admin tools. We added a settings tab for the integration and a response tab on each order, so staff can see exactly what the supplier returned for every submission.
• Safe delivery. All development was done on a demo copy of the store with a cloned database, and we provided guidance for setting up the cron jobs on the live server.
• Post-launch fixes. When a price mismatch appeared on some products, we traced and fixed it. We also traced a product image problem to the way the supplier served its image URLs and passed on its image download documentation.

Tech stack

PHP, MySQL, OpenCart, SOAP/XML web services, cron