Developer Questions

Questions to ask the Developer

Recently, we had a call from a web developer who had taken a project building and integrating an ecommerce website with MAS 200. When we asked him if he had done this before he said, “No, but how hard can it be. You are just mapping one database field to another.” It is actually a little harder than that and you don’t want to be the one paying him to learn that it is harder.

If you are considering integrating an ecommerce website and your MAS ERP company file, you want to be sure that the person or company doing the work can deliver what you need. To help you in the selection process we have compiled the following list of questions that you should ask of each company/developer that you are considering for your project.

The first section is General Questions about the integration and their experience with doing integrations with MAS 90/200. The second section has Specific Questions concerning key aspects of MAS such as customer pricing and taxes that are crucial to any integration working well.

General Questions
  1. How many MAS 90/200 integrations have you done?
  2. Do you have any MAS 902/200 integration references that I can talk with?
  3. Can you show me a functioning website moving items, customer specific pricing, tax data, customers, invoices, sales orders, and shipping info from MAS to the website?
  4. Can you show me a functioning website moving sales orders, customers, credit card info, etc. from the website to MAS?
  5. What happens when we upgrade MAS to a new version? Do we have to rebuild the website? What are the costs for the website when I upgrade to a new MAS version (software and labor)?
  6. How do I add functionality to my site? What is the price for new modules? Is the website down when upgrades are made?
  7. Do you have access to hundreds of software modules that can be demonstrated prior to purchase?
  8. Do you have a pre-production environment to view/test module changes before they are published?
  9. Will I be the beta user of the software you are quoting? Do you have a version management system to handle changes?
  10. What technology/process do you use to transfer data between the website and MAS?
  11. How often is data updated?
  12. Does my MAS server have to be online for the website to work?
Specific Questions
  1. If you add a new customer in MAS, does that customer get automatically added to the website?
  2. If a new customer comes to the website, is their account information transferred to MAS?
  3. If you add a ship to address in MAS for the customer does that automatically show up on the website?
  4. If a customer changes or adds a ship to address on the website, is the change reflected in MAS?
  5. If you change a customer’s payment terms (for example COD to net30), does that automatically change the payment options for the customer in the website?
  6. Can you manage customer specific pricing in MAS and have it automatically updated on the website?
  7. Can you manage retail pricing from the inventory master and apply a price level to public (retail) pricing?
  8. Can you see Sales orders (open and historical) on the website from transactions that were both placed on the web and initiated in MAS?
  9. Can customers view Invoice history and open invoices from MAS?
  10. Can customers pay open invoices online? And have them flow correctly into MAS?
  11. Do shipments and shipment tracking numbers flow automatically from MAS to the website?
  12. Does the inventory level in MAS flow to the website and display correctly on each product?
  13. How is tax calculated? Are you able to manage tax rules/settings in MAS and have them flow to the website?
  14. Are you able to manage tax exempt customers in MAS and have them flow to the website?
  15. If you are you using the Sage Payment gateway for credit card purchases:
    1. Have you done the integration between the website and the Sage Payment Solutions gateway?
    2. If so, would you be able to pre-authorize the card on the site and pass the transaction into MAS for capture/completion?

We hope this helps you select a company to do your integration between an ecommerce website and MAS. Websitepipeline can answer all these questions to your satisfaction.

For a free demonstration and estimate please contact websitepipeline at 1-800-266-3579 or Contact Us