How does the integration between RetailVista and the Life & Garden webshop work?

This document describes the integration between online RetailVista stores, offline RetailVista stores, and the central Life&Garden webshop.

This setup is different from what is typically used in most situations. At Life&Garden, a central webshop is used for the entire store formula. This means that LG determines the assortment as ShopServer substore '0'.

In RetailVista, the LG webshop is maintained by company 2, Life & Garden Franchise. It connects to the ShopServer as ShopServer store 60, with substore 0.

All other online LG RetailVista stores have the same ShopServer number 60 as the ShopServer store from which the webshop assortment is determined, but each has its own substore number. In this situation, RetailVista simply looks at the established assortment by ShopServer store 60 and communicates the stock level of the store for that assortment. The store does not need to create its own webshop assortment!

It becomes slightly more complex with the offline stores. This includes LG EttenLeur, Leidschendam, and Hulst. RetailVista does not provide functionality for an offline store to look at the assortment of a main store and communicate stock. To achieve this, the ShopServer StockUpdater software has been developed for these offline stores. This software is installed on-site at a customer's location (usually a server) and is periodically called by the Windows Scheduler. At that time, all (!) stock mutations are retrieved from RetailVista and provided to the ShopServer.

The ShopServer will automatically ignore inventory changes of unknown barcodes. This allows an offline store to still communicate inventory with the centrally determined webshop assortment. There is a separate QA 522 about this ShopServer StockUpdater.

As far as we know at this moment, there is still no order flow back to RetailVista, it is currently only about sending product information and corresponding inventory levels.