Teaching WooCommerce to Speak Enterprise: An SAP Migration Story

WooCommerce is great for small businesses - just install and go. But what happens when you need it to handle enterprise-level complexity? That's where things get interesting.

The business was already moving from SAP to another ERP system to simplify operations, reduce maintenance costs, and be more nimble with products. WooCommerce was selected as a platform because it was open source, there were many plugins readily available, and the team already had experience with Wordpress for the main marketing site.

As old as it was, the SAP webshop had met business requirements for a long time, and WooCommerce would have to match them.

Store Requirements:

• Custom pricing for retail customers, resellers, and government orders.
• Integration with a tax determination engine.
• Payment terms for approved customers.
• Delayed credit card capture.
• Daily product inventory uploads.
• Custom shipping rates per weight, zone, and service level.
• Ability for customers to store multiple ship-to addresses.
• Third Party Billing for customers with their own shipping accounts.
• Store managers can ghost in as users to assist if needed.
• User account import and mapping to pre-existing customers.
• Effortless transition for authenticated users of the old webshop.

Lessons Learned

Here's the thing about WooCommerce plugins: they're amazing starting points, but enterprise requirements always need that extra mile of custom development. The trick is making all those customizations feel invisible to the end user.

Quick win: We utilized an AI image upres tool that saved us from a product photo crisis. It turned our vintage-resolution product images into crisp, modern ones. Well, most of them anyway.

The Launch

Switching systems is always a nail-biter, especially when your users have been comfortable with the old way for years. Apart from a few WordPress welcome emails playing hide-and-seek in spam folders, the transition was surprisingly smooth.

Bonus Round: A Fresh Marketing Site

While we were at it, we gave the company website a complete makeover. We finally freed the marketing team from having to bug developers every time they needed to update content. Two birds, one stone.

What we delivered:

• A drag-and-drop page builder that let the marketing team create content without calling IT.
• A cleaner, more intuitive home for product guides and resources.
• A special portal just for partners and resellers.
• Simplified the whole website structure (goodbye complicated multisite setup!).
• Seamless connection between the marketing site and store.

In the end, we proved that WooCommerce could handle enterprise-grade challenges while keeping things simple for everyone - from customers to partners to staff. And we did it all on schedule, which made the project managers very happy.