E-commerce has never been so successful with lockdown. People have more time and consume differently. In the same time, for many companies it is an opportunity to change their way of acting and to propose new services. Purchases flow in and administrative work is increased.
This can become a very important and unusual time-consuming task and a source of error when copying into the internal management system.
Almost all e-commerce CMS now offer tools to interact with other systems. Commonly called Web Services or API (tools for translating flows between the different systems), they allow sharing what has been entered on the website to a more ergonomic management system, for administrative management, and vice versa.
Since version 16, FileMaker Pro allows the use of cURL requests, the technology required to query the APIs of your merchant site. But it can also allow communication with other systems such as the weather, the stock market and many other services or e-commerce platform.
SquareSpace is one of these platforms. It allows you to create e-commerce websites in a large number of areas: art gallery, photography, e-commerce etc. SquareSpace offers a fully customizable showcase collecting the different orders and payments from customers in relation to the stocks available in a product catalog.
In addition to all these features, SquareSpace provides a web service for the commerce part of the site. It is possible to retrieve all orders, transactions and inventory status.
We have therefore developed an interconnection for our client “Les Visites de Marta” https://www.lesvisitesdemarta.com between an existing FileMaker solution and a website hosted by SquareSpace.
The problem was the time our client spent entering in his FileMaker solution the various invoices and credit notes relating to orders placed on the SquareSpace merchant site.
By developing a module using cURL and Json functions directly in our client's FileMaker CRM solution, we were able to first automate the retrieval of SquareSpace's orders and payment transactions. Then we automated the creation of customers in the CRM and finally we automated the creation of invoices and credit notes from elements retrieved directly in the FileMaker solution. This development, of only 2 days, has made it possible to reduce a weekly working time from several hours to just a few minutes. Our client can now spend time adding more value to his business.
