Multi-tenant WooCommerce & Greentree ERP integration

Brief

Architect and build a custom WooCommerce multi-tenant platform that integrates with Greentree ERP for products and orders.

Context

This project came about while I was consulting for Digital Thing back in 2018. The client was after a new e-commerce solution that would import thousands of products from their Greentree ERP into 'sub sites' for each customer.

The challenge here was that the customer had dozens of customers they sold products to and each of those required their own e-commerce catalog and logins for their users. These catalogs (and prices) had to come from Greentree and the orders also had to sync back to Greentree after being processed in WooCommerce.

On top of this, there were other integrations, such as OpenFreight API for shipping cost calculation, that were required.

Solution

This was a particularly challenging project for many reasons. The client preferred we use WooCommerce because of it's cost and ease of use. We explored the use of WordPress multi-site setups with WooCommerce as well as standalone sites.

Ultimately we settled on a solution where each tenant had it's own WordPress and WooCommerce instance, but they all ran the same custom theme and plugin that would handle all of the API integration with GreenTree, OpenFreight etc.

Each instance could then also be configured using custom parameters that controlled syncing of data between the ERP and the e-commerce site itself.

There were of course other workflows that were incorporated such as custom notifications depending on tenant config, as well as API triggers to start workflows within Greentree.

This was one of the more challenging and fun projects of 2018 and I learned a lot about working with ERPs like Greentree.