Mayank Patel
Oct 9, 2025
5 min read
Last updated Oct 9, 2025
For many B2B companies, an ecommerce site and an ERP system are both mission-critical but too often, they don’t actually talk to each other. When the two operate in silos, the cracks quickly show: mismatched inventory levels, delayed order updates, duplicate data entry, and frustrated customers who can’t trust the information they see online.
This disconnect isn’t usually the result of poor planning; it’s the byproduct of legacy systems, rushed integrations, and organizational silos that never got bridged. Businesses lose speed, customer satisfaction takes a hit, and teams spend more time fixing errors than focusing on growth.
In this post, we’ll dig into why these integration challenges exist in the first place, what risks they create for B2B companies, and—most importantly—how you can build an easy connection between your ecommerce and ERP systems so they function as one unified engine driving your business forward.
Disconnected ecommerce and ERP systems usually aren’t a deliberate choice; they’re often the result of historical decisions and organizational silos. Here are some key reasons the disconnect exists:
In many companies, the ecommerce platform and the ERP were implemented at different times, often by different teams, and were never designed to work together. They operate as separate islands of data. This means product, inventory, and customer information gets duplicated in each system, and there’s no single source of truth.
Legacy or Inflexible Systems
Many B2B companies run on legacy ERP systems or older software that weren’t built with open integration in mind. These older systems might lack modern APIs or have limited capabilities to export/import data in real-time. As a result, connecting them to a newer cloud ecommerce platform is challenging. Companies often resort to batch fi le transfers or custom scripts as a stopgap, but those are brittle and slow.
B2B transactions are inherently more complex than consumer transactions. There are custom price lists, specific payment terms, multi-step order workflows, and often multiple systems involved (ERP, CRM, warehouse management, etc.).
This complexity means there’s a lot of data and process logic that needs to be kept consistent between ecommerce and ERP. If integration isn’t done properly, it’s easy for something to break. For example, a B2B web order might need to create not just an order record but also a customer record or a contract reference in the ERP.
Some companies have attempted to connect ecommerce and ERP in the past, but in a haphazard way. For example, they might have a daily CSV export from the web store that someone uploads into the ERP, or a direct database link that was coded years ago by a now-gone developer.
These point-to-point integrations are fragile. As the business grows or software gets updated, the old integration often breaks, and it can be expensive or time-consuming to fix. Moreover, such integrations might only cover part of the data (maybe orders but not inventory, or basic price sync but not promotional discounts).
Sometimes the issue is not just technology, but process. If the teams managing the ecommerce site and the ERP are siloed (e.g. e-commerce under Marketing and ERP under IT/Finance), integration projects may not get the cross-functional attention they deserve.
The company might continue operating with a mindset of “the website is one system, our order management is another” rather than treating it as one unified workflow. This can lead to manual processes being institutionalized, for e.x., “every morning, our web manager prints out the new orders and walks them to the fulfillment department.”
Also Read: How to Determine the Right Type of Marketplace to Scale Your B2B Ecommerce
The goal is to enable seamless, real-time communication so that both systems share the same accurate information at any given moment. Here are some sound strategies to consider for B2B teams:
Rather than writing brittle point-to-point code to link one system to the other, many companies are now using middleware or Integration-Platform-as-a-Service (iPaaS) solutions. These act as a unifying bridge between your ecommerce and ERP (and any other systems, like CRM or warehouse software).
For example, when an order is placed, the iPaaS can simultaneously create the order in ERP, decrement inventory there, and update the inventory on the website. Middleware often comes with pre-built connectors for popular ERP and e-commerce systems.
The advantage of a dedicated integration layer is that it’s more scalable and easier to maintain than a tangle of direct connections. If you add a new sales channel (say a marketplace or a mobile app) or switch one of your systems, you can adjust the integration in one central place instead of rewriting multiple interfaces.
Modern iPaaS solutions also provide monitoring and error-handling, so you get alerts if something fails to sync (instead of discovering it days later in an audit). They support real-time data exchange and can queue transactions if one system is temporarily offline.
It reduces that high maintenance burden of custom integrations. You’re not constantly troubleshooting broken APIs or reconciling mismatched records, because the platform handles the heavy lifting. For a B2B company dealing with complex processes, using a robust middleware or iPaaS is often the fastest way to knit together disparate systems into a cohesive whole.
A cornerstone of fixing the ecommerce-ERP gap is moving from batch or periodic updates to real-time or near-real-time synchronization for key data. In the past, a nightly batch update might have been considered sufficient, for example, uploading today’s orders to ERP at midnight, or refreshing the website’s inventory once a day.
But today, that’s no longer acceptable. You need product availability, pricing, and order status to be current all the time. For instance, if the ERP registers a new sale (from any channel), it should decrement the inventory and the website should reflect that change right away.
Achieving real-time sync may involve a combination of techniques: event-driven architecture (where events like “Order Placed” or “Inventory Updated” trigger messages to other systems), webhooks from the ecommerce platform to notify the ERP, or continuous polling of APIs for changes.
The specifics will depend on your technology stack, but the guiding principle is to minimize latency between a change occurring and all systems knowing about that change. The benefits of this approach are huge.
Please note that not every single piece of data must be synced in real time. Some less volatile data (like product descriptions or static content) can update nightly or as needed. A smart integration will focus real-time eff orts on variable data (such as inventory quantities, orders, customer-specific pricing, order status updates) which are the pieces that need constant tracking.
A common mistake in disconnected environments is that different systems each think they’re the authority on a piece of information. Part of your integration strategy should be to defi ne clear ownership. For example, the ERP might be the system of record for inventory levels, pricing, and order fulfillment status, whereas the ecommerce platform might own the web content like images and rich product descriptions.
Once you assign a source of truth, the integration should be configured such that updates only happen in one direction for that data (or in a controlled two-way fashion with conflict resolution rules). This prevents the “two sources, no truth” problem. With a single, trustworthy master dataset for each domain, you avoid the scenario of dueling data where one system overrides the other unpredictably.
To maintain this, data governance practices need to be in place. This includes regular auditing of data sync logs to catch any inconsistencies, cleaning up legacy data that might be formatted differently between systems, and ensuring that any new data fi elds or code (like new product IDs or customer accounts) follow a consistent scheme across systems.
It’s also better to involve business users in verifying that integrated data makes sense (for instance, having inventory managers spot-check that the website shows the same stock numbers as the ERP for random SKUs). By investing in data quality up front, you avoid integration becoming “garbage in, garbage out.”
We often advise companies to audit and rationalize product catalogs, pricing rules, and customer lists before launching an integrated e-commerce project. This means cleaning up duplicates, aligning naming conventions, and purging outdated records so that when you connect systems, you’re syncing clean data sets.
Set up alerts for any integration failures or unusual discrepancies (for example, if an order fails to create in ERP, or if inventory counts diverge beyond a threshold). With proper monitoring, your team can proactively fi x issues before they escalate into customer-facing problems.
Also Read: What is a B2B Marketplace?
Every delay, duplicate, and manual step keeps you from scaling, adapting, and serving customers the way modern B2B demands. Closing the gap is less about fixing software and more about building a business that runs on clarity, speed, and trust.