Why would I use a FTP connection with Digital Commerce Platform?

Purpose

To explain why using a FTP connection may be useful to obtain ERP data imports, product images and/or documents.

Introducing terms and concepts used in this article

Term	Definition
Enterprise Resource Platform (ERP)	(ERP), a collection of your critical business operating systems, such as product, stock levels, financial, customers, suppliers and so on that run on the same platform.
File Transfer Protocol	(FTP), is a standard communication protocol that is used to transfer files between computers.
Web service	service that allows two disparate systems communicate with each other via a standard messaging system.

More information

FTP stands for File Transfer Protocol. It is a way of asynchronously sharing files between two servers.

The key benefits of connecting your server with the Digital Commerce Platform via FTP are that:

it is a reliable means of connection,
the data you wish you import are not currently included in our ERP integration web service,
you prefer to use a file transfer service, rather than fully integrating your ERP with our platform for a particular business reason.

Use case 1: ERP data imports

Import data

Typically, we use a web service to retrieve your ERP data. Depending on what features you are using, the ERP data includes product, customer and pricing data. There may be situations where the amount of data is large and the web service is unable to import them in a timely way. In this case, an FTP connection may be configured and the data is shared through automatic regular imports.

How it works

During your implementation, the content and format of a spreadsheet is agreed with you. The content defines the data you wish to export to the Digital Commerce Platform, while the format defines the order in which that data is contained the spreadsheet.

We agree a spreadsheet format of the data you wish to import via FTP.

We supply FTP connection details which you can use to set up a regular export of this data to an agreed file location on our AWS server.

We configure our platform to perform a regular import of files located at this agreed file location.

Use case 2: Importing product images and documents

Import

This feature allows you to set up an automatic import of product data, images and additional product specifications, and attach them to existing products in your catalogue that are already stored on the Digital Commerce Platform.

How it works

During your implementation, the content, naming conventions and format of what is to be exported via FTP is agreed with you.

We supply FTP connection details which you can use to set up a regular export of this data to an agreed file location on our AWS server.

We configure our platform to perform a regular import of images, specifications and other product data located at this agreed file location.

Key points

An FTP connection may be useful if you have large volumes of data to import, or if you wish to import product data, images and product specifications to display in WebShop.
Modifying a FTP connection once it has been set up requires us to configure settings on the Digital Commerce Platform. Contact us for more details in relation to this process.