What is Integration With Magento and How to Develop It?

In 2022, more software developers and software providers will start integrating with Magento. The access to Magento e-stores’ data will allow these software owners to make their products available to Magento users.

Magento is one of the biggest and most popular shopping cart solutions on the market. It has stood the test of time and competition, powering over 12% of all online stores worldwide. In addition, Magento equals 250,000 active users who download its application about 5,000 times every day.

This article explores the advantages and possibilities provided by Magento integration. You will also learn about common problems with integration development.

Magento Integration Explained

Magento integration is the process of tying any software with this platform’s API. This allows communicating with the Magento system and getting access to the necessary data from Magento e-stores.

Magento is a complex, difficult-to-use eCommerce platform. It has been programmed on the basis of the Model View Controller (MVC) approach and requires intensive knowledge of web programming.

Magento Integration: Why You Should Develop It

Magento, an e-commerce platform for websites, has been gaining popularity over the years. Other platforms exist in the market, but Magento has proven to be a leader in terms of popularity. According to Builtwith.com, 70,000+ stores use the software in the United States alone. The United Kingdom, with 15,000 sites, comes in second place for Magento usage. Germany is third with 12,000+ websites using the software. 9 of the top 10 countries for Magento sites are North American and European countries.

Integrating Magento with your software is a worthwhile investment because all of Magento’s customers are also potential customers of yours. This will allow you to increase your market share considerably.

In addition, a connection to the Magento API allows for access to data on orders, products, customers, shipments, taxes, etc. Without such data provided by online stores, various software and applications cannot perform their main functions.

Integrating your software with Magento’s API, however, can be challenging. It requires significant time, money, and other resources. Among the challenges are: finding an experienced developer; waiting a few weeks for a result; and paying several thousands of dollars for the integration itself. Furthermore, after a connection has been made, there is more work to do.

Integrating software with an eCommerce platform like Magento can be a daunting task, as Magento is one of the most in-depth and best-developed eCommerce frameworks available. First, good Magento developers are hard to find, and thus it can be difficult to find an experienced one to do the integration part. Those who haven’t worked much with genuinely object-oriented, quality enterprise frameworks such as Magento will likely meet many challenges and will need to put a lot of effort not to get “stuck.” Since developers working with Magento for the first time will likely run into a number of issues, it would be easier to work with the platform for those PHP developers who have used such serious frameworks previously, such as Zend or CakePHP.

However, even though it would require much time to develop an integration module, it wouldn’t be done without much effort and headaches. Therefore, this type of developer’s work would cost thousands of dollars per month.

Magento Specifics

Most eCommerce solutions use one database table to store product information, another one for category data, and a third one to link the categories with their products. Instead of this, Magento uses an EAV (Entity-Attribute-Value) database model and stores its data across 40 tables. In addition to the system’s complexity, this is also a hindrance to performance due to the complexity of the SQL queries.

One disadvantage of the Magento platform is the way it handles imports. After pushing the “Import” button, it must already be established. But if we look at info contained in imporexport_importdata, we will find data from the file that was just validated. This table is erased before it runs through the file. Therefore, errors might occur because of the way Magento validates the data.

3 Common Issues When Integrating with Magento

1. If a single item is contained in an array, the value is returned as a single item, rather than an array. To compensate for this problem, you can add code to the function that checks whether the array contains a single item and transforms it into an array if it does.
2. Another challenge is the accuracy of API documentation. It is not always correct. For example, when creating a product with the help of the API, you need to specify the websites to which it is to be assigned. The documentation mentions a parameter — website of type ArrayOfString that should contain this info. But if you send it in such a way, you will fail because the parameter key has to be website_id and it must be in an array of arrays format that contains the website id info.
3. When reindexing from the platform admin panel, certain options are not available, and you might experience flat data and product price reindex errors.

How to Develop The Integration with Magento Easily?

API2Cart is an integration service that makes multiple integrations cheaper and more streamlined for software vendors wishing to integrate with Magento or other shopping carts. The service provides a unified API for multiple shopping cart solutions.

Integrating with API2Cart can help you make your software more successful by reducing the time and energy needed to set up connections between your software or application and multiple shopping platforms.

API2Cart provides more than 100 API methods for the retrieval, addition, update, and sync of all necessary data from Magento e-stores. This allows you to easily manage information about products, orders, prices, shipments, taxes, and customers.