One of our customer would like to have vTiger to manage the customers and orders in vTiger and have a web shop integrated with it. After a lot of investigations we are now planning to integrate vTiger CRM with Tienda Shopping cart.
Tienda is an Open Source eCommerce software for Joomla Content Management System. It is quite extensive and is in a high rate of development. Tienda is developed and managed by Dioscouri Design. It allows you to have unlimited products, unlimited categories, various payment methods, unlimited user groups, pricing by user groups etc.
vTiger on the other hand is the Open Source Customer Relationship Manager (CRM) which allows you to manage your contacts, accounts, products, sales pipeline, sales orders etc.
A full synchronisation will be when Products, Customers and Invoices created in web store are available in vTiger CRM. But there are some catches here and there. And specially, there isn’t any API available for Tienda and hence the synchronisation will be unidirectional (from Tienda to vTiger).
Products Sync & Challenges
- Full Product Sync from Tienda to vTiger – First full synchronisation which will take all the products from Tienda and put them in vTiger CRM.
- Category Sync from Tienda to vTiger – Any Category created or edited should be synchronised to vTiger. The challenge is that vTiger doesn’t support nested categories for products. So we made a decision that only the top level category will be synchronised with vTiger.
- Product Update from Tienda to be Synchronised to vTiger CRM – When a Product Information is updated, it is synchronised to vTiger CRM as well.
- Pricing Update from Tienda to be Synchronised to vTiger CRM – When a Price is updated in Tienda that price is input in vTiger as well. This is possible for default group price only. Tienda allows you to set different pricing for different group of customers on the other hand vTiger allows Price Books. We decided that we will synchronise the default group price only.
Contacts Sync
Contacts are managed by Joomla and Tienda together. We will not synchronise usernames and passwords from Joomla to vTiger Customer Portal as it is not a requirement at the moment.
Also, the website may see a lot of contact registrations but only very few purchases. As lead generation is not the target as yet, the contacts will only be synchronised when they make a purchase.
Invoice Sync
Again a number of orders can be placed on the website which may or may not mature to a successful sale and hence we will only synchronise those orders which go to the status payment complete in Tienda. If the contact does not exist in vTiger it will be created. The invoice will be created in vTiger for each order as soon as it goes to the status payment complete. The actual prices of the products will be put in the invoice (as product price may be different from what vTiger has).
This and lot more is being thought upon. I would like to hear what are your thoughts about it and if there is anything that you can suggest otherwise.
