How does the RetailVista integration work with EffectConnect?

RetailVista will have an integration with EffectConnect starting from spring 2023 update. This document describes the one-time settings and some notes about this integration. 

In order to use the integration with EffectConnect, it is necessary to add it as a webshop. For this, a webshop CAL is required, as well as the 'EffectConnect integration' license. Furthermore, the 'Sales Orders Plus' license is required for order processing. 

The screenshot below shows the important settings for a successful integration with EffectConnect. The ApiKey and ApiSecret will appear within the EffectConnect website when an API token is created. It seems important, however, to assign this API token to one or more sales channels within EffectConnect after its creation, otherwise no orders from those channels will be received. The support desk of EffectConnect can undoubtedly assist with this.

PaymentTypeCode=<value>

This setting ensures that all payments from EffectConnect orders are always assigned to the prepayment type with this code. If this setting is not specified, the 'IDeal' code will be searched for as the prepayment type. In the order message from EffectConnect, one or more order lines with the status 'Paid' are searched for. For each of these order lines, a payment line is created in the order message using the value of this setting as the payment type.

TransportTypeCode=<value>

This setting ensures that all orders from Magento are assigned the transport type with this code as the transport type.

The 'TransportTypeCode' setting indicates the type of delivery that should be assigned to orders originating from EffectConnect. Therefore, there is no support within the EffectConnect platform for consumers to choose their own delivery method, as all orders are assigned to a fixed transport type.

It is possible to enter multiple 'TransportTypeCode' settings.

The syntax is 'TransportTypeCode=<Country code>,<Transport type code>.

An example is TransportTypeCode=NL,Bez. This ensures that orders with a delivery country with code 'NL' use transport type code 'Bez'. This functionality is very useful when working with a parcel service integration, where each country requires its own parcel service settings.

An example of this is SendCloud, where in the case of delivery in, for example, Belgium, Dutch carriers should not be chosen.

FeesBarcode=<value>

EffectConnect supports adding certain 'Fee' (surcharge/handling cost) rules to order messages. These rules are not assigned a barcode by EffectConnect, but a barcode is essential for RetailVista because these rules are added to the order as 'Products'.

This setting allows you to specify the barcode of the product that should be applied when receiving fee rules. The amount associated with a fee is and remains provided by EffectConnect.

The integration with EffectConnect supports retrieving orders and sending products and track & trace codes with reservations. In the 'Orders' and 'Export' tabs above, you can set whether this is desired.

Furthermore, it is important to create a task schedule for sending data to webshops and receiving orders from webshops (if not already present).

For receiving orders from EffectConnect, it is highly desirable to know which underlying system the orders originate from. In EffectConnect, these are called 'Channels'.

For RetailVista, this is a new entity that has been added. This entity is automatically populated with channels that appear in order messages.

If a new channel is added to EffectConnect and orders are generated from it, that channel will automatically appear within RetailVista. In addition to a webshop indication, a sales channel is also visible for each sales order. Of course, it can also be searched for.

Mutations from RetailVista (sending products and sending track & trace codes for reservations) are processed 'asynchronously' by EffectConnect. This means that such mutations are placed in a kind of queue.

When sending these mutations, RetailVista performs a check after 1 minute to see if the mutation has been processed by EffectConnect. If that is not the case (yet), it will be requested again after 5 minutes, and again after 10 minutes. If a mutation has not been processed after 3 attempts, the mutation is considered failed. This has little consequences for products.

In the next shipment, all products will be sent again, which in practice will be 24 hours later. For track & trace code shipments, they will be sent again during the next webshop export task planning. After 3 failed attempts to send track & trace codes for a reservation, they will be considered 'failed' and no further attempts will be made for that reservation.

For returning track & trace codes, EffectConnect wants to know the corresponding 'Carrier'. The track & trace code itself is not enough. In this case, the code of the parcel service from RetailVista is used as information to EffectConnect, and if a parcel service carrier is also used, that code is also added using a period as a separator. It is essential to map all occurring codes once in the EffectConnect website. The support desk of EffectConnect can assist with this.

During the realization of the EffectConnect integration, several disadvantages have emerged:

- There is no payment reference available from the PSP, the payment service provider.

Because this information is not available, automating refunds from returns is not possible.

- An order with multiple units of the same product results in 1 unit per line in EC. So if you order 3 of something, you get 3 lines.

 In the future, it should be considered whether it is necessary to merge such lines in RetailVista into 1 line. Otherwise, it will be very inconvenient for order picking. However, the problem here is that feedback on the delivery status per line is no longer possible: each line receives its own notification ID from EffectConnect and feedback must be given on that. Merging leads to the loss of that kind of data, unless it turns out that those IDs are the same for different lines with the same product.

- There is a potential issue with a high order volume because the EffectConnect API does not support paging.

This means that problems can arise with each request for orders since the previous synchronization if the number of orders is very high. If the total size of the response becomes too large for HTTP, the processing crashes.

- EffectConnect requires all products to be provided with each product synchronization.

Not just the changes, but everything. This requires quite a lot of resources and for that reason, it is not possible to update the products more than once every 24 hours. This has been resolved by checking with each synchronization whether a synchronization to the EffectConnect webshop has already taken place on the same day.

If not, all webshop products are collected and sent. If a synchronization has already taken place on the same day, only the stock and prices are sent.

It will practically mean that the first export after 0:00 AM will result in a complete product shipment, after which the remaining exports on the same day will only send inventory and prices.

If products are added to the EffectConnect webshop during the day, they will become visible after 0:00 AM. However, any inventory and prices of products added during the day will still be sent at each interval, and EffectConnect will reject those lines because the products themselves are not (yet) known. This does not cause any technical issues for EffectConnect, apart from a warning message in the processing report.

- A delivery method chosen by a customer does not come through in EffectConnect.

EffectConnect states that marketplaces do not offer such choices (evening delivery, etc.). Perhaps this is currently not possible, but they also do not provide for it technically. Therefore, a fixed delivery method must be set in the RetailVista configuration for EffectConnect. Furthermore, EffectConnect is mainly designed to connect with marketplaces and not with individual webshops such as ShopWare, WooCommerce, etc.

- EffectConnect only supports URLs for images.

Currently, RetailVista does not have available URLs, only the images themselves. Therefore, images are not yet sent to EffectConnect. There will be an adjustment in RetailVista for integration with a CDN, a Content Delivery Network, most likely with Sirv (http://sirv.com). Images from RetailVista will then be registered with Sirv, after which the Sirv URL will be forwarded to EffectConnect. However, this means that if customers want to send images from RetailVista to EffectConnect, an additional license with a CDN is mandatory.

- Only Ean13 barcodes are allowed.

It must consist of exactly 13 characters.Less is being rejected, such as the use of fictional barcodes, Ean8 barcodes, and the like.