What would you do if you were us

bspencer

Hello, all. I realize this question has been asked before and I have looked over the posts in this forum. Never the less, there are many variables and opinions on the proper course of action.

Essentially, our company is being asked to begin taking sales via the Internet. The maximum amount of customers we have is around 100. We are running Nav 4 SP2 and do have Sharepoint (I mention this because I've noticed some solutions suggest it). The budget is tight this year. We are looking for suggestions on e-commerce solutions that integrate with Navision and are cost effective.

Based on your experiences, what direction would you go?

thanks for your time.

David_Singleton

With just 100 customers, and a tight budget, I would go for an of the shelf web shop solution. Most of these will upload a nightly XML file with all the sales orders for you. They normally have all the credit card issues sorted, so its simple. All you do is each night upload your inventory and prices (as XML), and then down load the orders, which are then XMLported into Navision.

Since you are on 4.00 there is no DCO issues, so its just a user to run the XML port.

David_Singleton

Oh and forget sharepoint, this is NOT what sharepoint is all about.

JHavermans

I have to agree with David about the XML solution when you have a tight budget. But...

1. When looking at your organisation, you have to think about the number of customers yes! But also to the number of orders. When you have 100 customers which order at least once a week, you getting some work to import all that stuff in your NAV system.
2. Also the realtime expierence is a thing. Do you want to show the customers your current stock? For instance "Order now, only 6 items in stock" or something like this?
3. Business rules. Do you have a straight forward NAV system of do you have some kind of customer assortments? Do you want to show the most recent order history, invoices and other NAV stuff to the customer?

So although you have a smaller budget, please think twice before making a decision for a solution.

About the product to use, their are about 10 suppliers of webbased software in combination with Navision. Most of them realtime or almost realtime.
Some based on custom development of CMS system, but others on SharePoint.

Let me know if you need more info!