ERP stock and price sync with per-country pricing for a bike shop

The challenge

A Bulgarian web agency brought us in to extend an online store it looks after for a bicycle retailer. The retailer's prices, promotional prices and stock levels live in its ERP system, so keeping the website accurate meant updating it by hand. The retailer also sells across borders and wanted visitors from different countries to see different prices in the right currency. On top of this, sales staff needed a quick way to turn a selection of products into an offer document for customers, and the product pages showed a colour selector even when only one colour existed.

What we did

• ERP synchronisation over SOAP. We built a SOAP client for the ERP's web service. It fetches retail prices, special prices and quantities that have changed since the last sync and matches products by model or UPC code. We set it up as a scheduled cron job on the hosting, and each run produces a CSV report of updated products that lists the main UPC before each variation UPC so staff can check changes at a glance.
• Country-based pricing. We developed a pricing extension that detects the visitor's country through a geolocation service and applies prices stored per product and country, in the matching currency. It falls back to default pricing if the location lookup fails. We also corrected the store's currency configuration and resolved a slowdown caused by the geolocation calls.
• Offer export. In the admin, staff can select products and export them, with attributes and pictures, to a CSV offer sheet.
• Cleaner product options. The colour option is now hidden when a product comes in only one colour.

Tech stack

OpenCart, PHP, MySQL, SOAP, cron, geolocation API