Magento is one of the famous eCommerce platforms that seamlessly lets online store owners create a custom shopping experience. It provides excellent navigation and multiple out-of-the-box features to its clients. Though like any other shopping platform it also comes with some integration challenges for the developers.
So, before you start building the integration with Magento, it will be helpful to know a little more about this platform. Magento happens to be on the priority list of many industry leaders, powering more than 12 percent of all the online stores globally. It equals around 185,000 users, and the stats show that users download this solution around 5,000 times every day.
So, what are the possible difficulties that developers face with this platform? Let’s find out here.
About Magento Integration
Magento integration refers to the process of connecting the platform’s API with any software systems like order management, shipping management, dropshipping automation, AR solutions, video commerce platforms, marketing automation, etc. It allows smooth communication between the Magento system and the other software systems. As a result of this integration, you get access to the necessary data and information from the e-store of Magento.
Magento is an intricate platform that performs in multiple ways. It is programmed depending on the core basics of the Model View Controller (MVC) approach. It is no wonder that it requires a lot of skills and web programming expertise for its integration and seamless functionality. The developers find it challenging to learn and work with this platform.
Why Do You Need to Integrate with Magento?
Magento happens to be the leader in its popularity and utility. According to Builtwith.com, Magento clients are primarily located in the USA as the number is around 66,000+ stores. The UK seems to be in the second position with 14,000 live websites.
Germany has the third position with 11,000+ sites using Magento. In addition, 9 of the top 10 Magento online stores are in North America and Europe. The popularity of Magento continues to increase each year. So, integrating your platform’s software system with Magento is a worthwhile investment for your company.
One of the main advantages is that you get to increase your market shares while increasing your company’s visibility in the market.
The benefits don’t end here. Instead, you also get full access to the data related to the customers, products, orders, taxes, shipments, etc., after connecting with the Magento API. Without these data and information retrieved from Magento’s e-stores, your platform would not be able to perform the required functions properly.
But although these are some of the advantages of using this platform, integrating Magento isn’t an easy task. It will require a lot of effort and time, along with other resources. Therefore, developers need to be very careful about their knowledge and skills before integrating this platform. Also, remember that you need tremendous efforts, a proper supply of funds, and timely investments to keep going with your integration.
Apart from expenses and time constraints, what do developers often face the other hassles during Magento integration? Let’s find out.
Developer Skill Requirement
The first thing to know about the Magento integration is that the developers having proper knowledge about this platform seems to be pretty rare. Therefore, it will require some time to build a team of efficient developers who can seamlessly work with Magento.
Why? That is because the developers who do not have proper exposure to object-oriented, quality project frameworks like Magento will be unable to perform as per need. Also, they will meet with severe complications and other challenges during Magento integration. Therefore, it will be helpful to find PHP developers who are proficient in handling CakePHP or Zend.
Nevertheless, it will also require adequate time and effort to elaborate the integration module. So, you might expect some more hurdles in your way while completing the entire process. Also, due to such complications, you have to pay thousands of dollars per month to the potential developers.
So, why do you need experienced developers who have proper knowledge about the platform? First, let’s check out the anatomy of this software to understand these complications.
Unwinding The Magento Anatomy
Most eCommerce solutions tend to use the database table that consists of information of products; categories and the rest are the ones connecting these. However, with Magento, the scenario is slightly different.
Magento has an EAV or Entity-Attribute-Value database model. It uses around 40 various tables that include data on categories and products. So, you see, complexity is one of the crucial drawbacks of this platform. Another one is that it works slow, resulting from the SQL query complexity.
Another thing to know about Magento anatomy is its complication towards importing the processes. After you push the “import button,” the process should start immediately. But hold on. Look closer to the imporexport_importdata file, and you will find data that just got validated.
So, it happens when you validate the file, and the platform will process by putting data into the table for quick access to the real import. Also, the table gets erased right before it runs through that file. So, all-in-all, there is always room for errors in the ways Magento validates the data.
Errors Occurring During Developing Magento Integration
So, with the Magento integration, some of the objects are supposed to return in an array format. But in only one item, it comes back as a single piece rather than in an array. Therefore, you need to add a function here to check if the info within the array format is correct, and if not, transform it into the correct one.
However, the other issues occur when you send information and data to Magento. How? Let’s talk about an example here. When you send hash objects to the platform containing underscore inside its name, you have to include the key within quotation marks. It might sound a tad easy for you, but it can take up a lot of time.
Another challenge that developers often face is the accuracy of the platform’s API. While creating a product with this API, specifying the assigned websites is essential. But suppose you include a parameter- website of type ArrayOfString in your documentation. It will never be successful as it has to be website_ids, which is an array of arrays format that will consist of the website id info.
The reindexing process is that when you try to do so from the platform admin panel, not every option will reindex. You also find reindexing errors with category flat data, product flat data, and product prices.
Lastly, the default values in Magento aren’t always stored in the system.xml files or database. So, the module developers must add a <default/> node along with the global configuration tree using the module’s config.xml file. As a result, the values will become the default ones, and the core_config_data table will only store the distinctly set info.
How Can You Connect With Magento API Easily?
So, now you have a fair understanding of how integration development is an expensive and technically challenging process. Do you wish to avoid these hassles? If so, API2Cart is the service for you.
It makes multiple integrations easy for any software vendor and lets you integrate with any complicated platform like Magento without any hassles. Multiple integrations via API2Cart happen to be the practical solution for the smooth functioning of your business software.
API2Cart brings you more than 100 API methods to retrieve, update, sync, and add data from Magento e-stores like prices, orders, customers, products, shipments, taxes, etc.
If you aim to minimize the Magento integration hassles and find a cost-effective, proven solution that can help you complete your work within a strict deadline, try API2Cart. Schedule your FREE consultation with our experts today.
