This article provides a brief overview and best practices for connecting your online shop to Xentral. You can find additional resources and in-depth information in the Related articles section. Guidelines for specific shops are available on the following links:

Goal

After completing the steps from this article, you will be able to automate your processes, meaning all your orders will be picked up and imported automatically, with no need for review or approval.

Prerequisites

To connect Xentral with your online shop, please ensure that you:

created products in Xentral
have a unique product number (SKU - Stock Keeping Unit) for all your products in your online shop
created a project in Xentral
added payment methods that you offer to your customers in Xentral
added carriers in Shipping methods
created products for shipping costs and discounts. For each of these products, go to Master data > Product and select either Item is postage or Discounted item

Workflows

The following procedures describe best practices for connecting your shop with Xentral.

Connecting the shop
Starting initial import of products to Xentral
Mapping products to your shop
Testing import from an online store to Xentral
Activating the warehouse synchronization
Going live

Connecting the shop

Log into Xentral, and go to Administration > Shop Interface > Online Shop.
Find the shop interface that you need.
Prepare the data for your connection. Setting up the connection differs from shop to shop.
Search your shop in this list.
Use the popup installation dialog box to complete your setup.
If this is your first time connecting Xentral to an online shop, don’t select any option in the Which features do you want to use? screen as this could lead to incomplete data transfer in this early stage of your setup and click Next.
After completing the setup, click Check the connection to verify it.

Starting initial import of products to Xentral

With some shop interfaces such as Shopify and Shopware 6, you can directly import product data to Xentral. As Xentral has more data fields than most shops, you will need an additional CSV import for the remaining data, such as supplier addresses, purchase prices, or stock numbers.

Other shop interfaces rely on CSV import of all article data. You can create your articles manually as well. Consider using your shop article number as your Xentral article number. If not possible, you will need to import your shop numbers as external numbers in Xentral. Refer to this manual for importing those numbers.

Mapping products to your shop

If you added your products manually or via a CSV import, you must connect each product with your shop interface to finalize the product setup. You can do this in three different ways in Xentral:

Mapping a single product

Go to Master data > Product, and open the product you would like to map.
Go to the Online Shop options tab, and click New Entry.
Enter the name of your online shop and click Save.

Mapping multiple products

Go to Master data > Product and select the products you want to map.
In the Bulk Batch Processing dropdown menu, select Bulk processing and click the To run button.
In the edit article window, select Shopverknüpfungen and click Next.
Choose the shop for each article and click Next.

CSV import of the shop connection

It is possible to import the shop connection for all articles via CSV. You can find the instructions on the following link.

Testing import from an online store to Xentral

Log into your online shop and create a test order. We recommend against using actual orders from your customers during the test phase.
Log into Xentral, go to Administration > Shop Interface > Online Shop, and open your online shop.
In the interface tab, set the import mode to Manually (With import center). Use the Trial (for testing) mode only to check the connection.
In the Settings tab, add your products that represent shipping costs and discounts.
Select the Orders in intermediate table check box. This option allows you to perform additional checks before the actual import.
In your shop, add the project for your online shop in the Project field and click Save.
Click the pickup orders button. You can check the orders in the intermediate table before you finally import them.
Select the order that you want to import.
Import your order and review it in Sales > Sales Order.

We recommend running test imports for each use case you expect (for example, different payment methods, carriers, discounts, and others). The orange pop-up warning in Xentral indicates that you need to map payment methods and carriers.

If you successfully performed the test import, you can deactivate the intermediate table. Once you deactivate it, you can import all existing orders directly to Sales > Sales Order without additional inspection.

Activating the warehouse synchronization

Note: Currently, Xentral can only send stock numbers to shops with one warehouse. For a multi-warehouse setup, Xentral can only send the information whether the product is sold out or not.

Log into Xentral, and set up your warehouse in Fulfillment > Warehouse Management.
Add your stock numbers to the warehouse.
Go to Master data > Products > Open your product > Online shop options and select the Stock numbers sync button to activate the warehouse synchronization of your products.
Hint: You can activate the warehouse synchronization of multiple products by using the batch processing option (located below the product list).
Go to your online shop and select the Allow warehouse numbers to be transferred check box in the Settings tab.
Check if the Lagerzahlen process starter is running.

Going live

After you have successfully tested the import process, you can fully automate the order import from the online shop to Xentral. Please ensure that all your Xentral users are familiar with your order workflow before automating the process.

To start the automated import process:

Log into Xentral, go to Administration > Shop Interface > Online Shop, and open your online shop.
Update the import mode from Manually (With import center) to Automatically (via process starter).
Ensure you activated the Shopimport process starter. This process should run at 15-minute, or longer intervals.

Common issues & questions

What features are available for which shop?

You can find a table with all supported features for all shop interfaces in Online Shops > Shop functions.

I can’t export products from Xentral to the online shop.

Ensure that you allow the transfer of product data in your shop settings.
Does the product number in Xentral fit your number in your shop? If not, is the product number added to the foreign numbers tab within your Xentral product.
Do you have unique numbers for all your products?

Deep dive articles: