Stone Edge Order Manager & Product Cart

We have been using Stone Edge for about 3 years now.  Stone Edge does not provide an integration with Product Cart but you can have a developer create one pretty quickly.  We had a custom one created for use and we also run several SQL jobs to hourly update information between the two systems. 

For us and most eCommerce companies it is better to use a more robust order management system than to try and use what is in Product Cart.  You will get much better efficiency. 

The problem you run into with any Order Management system that is not sharing the same database as your eCommerce system is online order lookups.  Because once you import your orders into Stone Edge then it becomes the master holder of the information.  Meaning if you make changes to the order, cancel the order, ship the order or etc all that information is stored in Stone edge and is not repopulated in Product Cart.  Therefore, we have disabled all abilities for our customers to view order history, track packages, etc using Product Cart.  Stone Edge offers a online order tracking system which works seamlessly with their products and can be used on your website.

Hope this helps some.

It would be phenomenal if there was 2 way integration.  We have 3 web stores now and are planning on more.  We really need something like Stone Edge so we can get all our fulfillment in one place and not have to login to each cart and download orders, then go through a bunch of steps to get all the fulfillment done, then post tracking information back to the websites.  It is getting quite time consuming.  I would love it if information could be updated back to ProductCart.  We are moving our stores to ProductCart one at a time from their current carts, 2 of them are using Volusion.  I would imagine a lot of Volusion customers would be very interested in making the switch to ProductCart if there was two-way integration with Stone Edge.  There has been some debate here at our office about changing to ProductCart since there was no supported Stone Edge integration, but ProductCart has such a wonderful set of features and is so easy to use we have decided to use it.  Is there any way to speed the development of this two-way integration.  This feature would be quite important to have prior to the Christmas rush.

I would also be very interested in having this integration with Stone Edge Order Manager, especially considering that we already own a license for Stone Edge and are currently running two ProductCart stores!

We have developed our own integration with Stone Edge.  Here is what I recommend.

1.  Use the Stone Edge Order Manager's custom order import feature and import orders from Product Cart into Stone Edge's Order Manager.

2.  If you are pretty good with writting SQL queries then write a query that updates Product Cart stock values from Stone Edge (Access Database) and have it run every hour or so using a Job scheduler.  You can do with with SQL Express (Free) and a product like SQL Express Job Builder from Vale Software to do the schedule.  Most of the time your Order Management System will be at your physical location and your website hosted somewhere else.

We actually do a little more tighter integration but that will take longer to develop.  Just remember that you will not be able to send order information back to Product Cart.  So when you choose to move to Stone Edge you will want it to handle all your fullfillment needs.

Hope this helps.

We have tabled this integration for now, due to the fact that StoneEdge has told us that a new XML based integration is forthcoming.  Please check back in 3-4 weeks for an update.