Summary
“Why do these IT people over-complicate things?” - if you've looked at a B2B eCommerce integration quote and compared it to a quick’n’dirtthe real; cy solution using tools like Zapier, you’re not alone. This month, we’re exploring why professional service providers charge what they do, and finding out why a quick solution at a fraction of the price may have hidden costs. Yes, we’re biased – but yes, we’ve also seen the down side of getting this wrong.
The comparison rarely tells the full story.
Starting Out with DIY Tools
It’s possible to get a long way using a tool like Zapier, IFTTT, Tray.io, or writing your own code. You can fairly quickly build something that, for example, takes a spreadsheet of products, and sends each one to your website. The difficulty starts with what IT people call “edge cases” – those bits of data which don’t quite fit, like a SKU which contains a space, or an image which is just too large. You end up going through a long, iterative process of something new breaking every day, adding a fix, and trying again. Those hours add up, because every type of data we deal with – addresses, products, invoices – has these edge cases, and it takes industry knowledge combined with IT skill to handle them quickly.
How the Complexity Builds
Most businesses don’t set out to build a complicated system. It starts with one problem: a supplier portal that doesn’t send orders to your ERP, product data needs manually uploading every time something changes, an order management workflow falls apart the moment volume picks up. You find something that fixes that one issue. Reasonable decision.
Then another gap appears. Another tool. Another bolt-on. Another tweak.
Before long, you have a spaghetti-like tangle of stuff that no single person fully understands. The logic that made sense when it was built is now buried across four or five different systems. The person who configured it may have moved on. The documentation is patchy.
When something breaks, fixing one thing tends to break another. Patch that, and something else surfaces. It becomes reactive, expensive, and none of it is moving your business forward. You’re not growing. You’re managing technical debt.
The Data Problem Nobody Talks About
Fragmented systems don’t just create operational headaches – at GetConnect, we have a phrase “Experience the problem”. This simply means exposing hidden problems – for example, when Fred in Accounts knows that orders for client X download in the wrong currency, and silently fixes it. Fred is hiding a problem that could be costly for the business.
When your B2B portals, order management, and fulfilment processes aren’t properly connected, the data you’re working with is incomplete. You can’t see what’s performing. You can’t identify where orders are stalling. You can’t make confident decisions about where to grow next.
Getting your integration right from the start means your systems are generating clean, consistent, usable data at every stage of the fulfilment journey. That data is what lets your portals actively support growth rather than simply process transactions.
What Joined-Up Integration Actually Looks Like
When GetConnect works with you, we don’t look at one problem in isolation. We look at the whole picture, from the moment a B2B buyer accesses your portal right through to end-to-end fulfilment.
GetConnect Hub sits at the centre of that: a single integration framework that connects your eCommerce store, your ERP, your client portals, and your procurement systems, with a centralised dashboard where you can see every data transfer, sync status, and activity log in real time.
From there, specific tools handle specific parts of the journey:
ERPBridge automates everything that happens after an order is placed, so your team isn’t manually keying data between systems or chasing address mismatches.
Product Sync removes the need to manually upload product data every time something changes, keeping your portals accurate and your clients informed.
PunchOut connects your eCommerce store directly to your clients’ procurement systems, so enterprise buyers can work with you on their terms, without friction.
SSO Integration gives your clients seamless, secure access to their portal, removing the login barriers and reducing your risks around GDPR compliance.
Each of these can be built into a setup that works around how your business already operates. You don’t need to change your existing eCommerce stack to make it work.
A Real-World Example
We worked with a premium kitchen and outdoor brand processing upwards of 10,000 orders a day at peak. They came to us with a fragmented setup: disconnected systems, rising complexity, and limited visibility across their fulfilment operation.
Beginning with one specific integration – connecting Microsoft Dynamics NAV to the B&Q / Kingfisher Marketplace, we built them a unified hub that provided control and observability of their data and processes. Their team could see exactly what was happening, and easily work out issues. Later, building on this solid foundation allowed them to connect with Amazon and other marketplaces. It became a genuine growth engine rather than an administrative burden, and all of that stemmed from understanding the whole picture, and building a system with scalability in mind.
Running the Full Cost Comparison
If you’re weighing up a professional service like GetConnect against a cheaper alternative, or doing it in-house, it’s worth running the numbers beyond the initial quote.
Factor in development time, ongoing maintenance, those edge cases, the risk and cost of downtime, and the staff hours spent on manual processes that should be automated. We’ve covered the cost of downtime in a previous edition of this newsletter, and those figures were significant on their own.
Add to that the longer-term cost of operating without reliable data, and the growth you’re not achieving because your systems are holding you back, and the comparison often looks quite different.
Want to Talk It Through?
If you’ve had a conversation with us and cost was a sticking point, we’re happy to revisit it with you. We can work through what a realistic full-picture comparison looks like for your specific setup, including a free consultation on your integration roadmap.
