ERP integrations are where ecommerce ambitions meet operational reality. They’re also where a lot of projects go wrong. After working on dozens of these integrations, we’ve seen the same mistakes repeat across different ERPs, different industries, and different team sizes.
Understanding these patterns won’t make your integration easy. But it might help you avoid the most common traps.
Mistake 1: Starting with the Data Model
The natural instinct is to start by mapping fields. Order number goes here, SKU goes there, price goes in this column. It feels productive because you’re making visible progress.
But field mapping is the easy part. The hard part is understanding the workflow. When should data move? What happens if it fails? Who gets notified? What does ‘success’ even mean?
Start with workflows, not data models. Understand the business process end-to-end before you write the first line of integration code.
Mistake 2: Treating the ERP as Source of Truth for Everything
ERPs are designed to be authoritative systems. That’s their strength—they’re built to be the single source of truth for financial and operational data. But that doesn’t mean they should be the source of truth for everything.
Product content, pricing rules, promotional logic—these often belong in your commerce platform, not your ERP. Trying to force everything through the ERP creates bottlenecks, complexity, and frustration.
Mistake 3: Underestimating Error Handling
Happy path integrations are easy. The challenge is everything else. What happens when the ERP is down? When a product doesn’t exist? When the data format changes? When the network times out halfway through a batch?
Every integration needs a clear answer to: what happens when this fails? And that answer needs to include how problems get detected, how they get communicated, and how they get resolved.
Mistake 4: Building for Today’s Volume
An integration that works at 100 orders per day might break at 1,000. Rate limits, batch sizes, database locks, memory usage—all of these scale differently than you expect.
Design for 10x your current volume. If you can’t afford that, at least know where the bottlenecks are and have a plan for addressing them.
The Path Forward
Good ERP integrations aren’t just technical achievements. They’re the result of clear thinking about business processes, realistic planning for failure, and honest assessment of what each system should own.
Get those foundations right, and the technical implementation becomes much more straightforward.