Connect: Veracore

Who is Veracore?

Veracore offer a SaaS Order and Warehouse management system. Based out of the US, the team at Veracore specialise in Fulfillment and helping their customers automate and streamline their operations. You can find out more about the company and their software here.

Our integration

Our integration in its current form is quite complex. We use a number of different methods, which we will touch on in this article, to create a tight integration that includes:

Creating and syncing products - including product imagery, default pricing and stock levels.
Assign products to categories to replicate your Veracore catalog hierarchy in Infigo.
Import Veracore users into Infigo - Including their Category Access Group/Department
Pushing orders into Veracore when it is placed in Infigo
Updating the status of an order in Infigo to shipped when triggered from Veracore - along with updating the delivery method and storing the tracking number

Basic Setup

Our Connect: Veracore plugin is a paid module, so if you are interested in purchasing it please submit a ticket to purchase the module and you'll be sent a quote.

Once the plugin is enabled the initial setup process is very simple:

1. Enable the plugin. Simply search Connect in admin and it will return two results that you need

Connect Settings - Open this page in a new tab and Under the list of Enabled Connect Plugins you should see Connect: Veracore ensure that this is checked.
Connect Plugins - Open this in another tab and here is where you can start configuring the connection

2. Start off by entering in your Veracore API URL, and also your API username and password - all of which, if you aren't sure, can be provided to you by your Veracore support team.

During the setup process we also recommend Disabling the Sync until you have configured the plugin and setup your storefront appropriately.

3. Once you have entered this information you now have the basics in place and can start the more advanced setup.

Products Sync

NOTE: The only products supported in this sync process are Infigo stock products. No variable products will be created as part of this process. If you wish for variable products to be created this would need to be done manually in addition.

This part of the Veracore plugin allows for your Veracore products to be pulled in and created in Infigo.

This is the information we sync and how it is mapped into Infigo:

Veracore property	Infigo property	Comments
ID	SKU	Unique product code
Description	Product Name	The Infigo product display name
OrderMinimum	Minimum basket qty	Minimum quantity allowed to be ordered
OrderLimit	Maximum basket qty	Maximum quantity allowed to be ordered
ImageLocal / FullImagePath	Product Image(s)	An array of product images stored against the product
ID	External ID	Used to map the product in Infigo to the product in Veracore
Inactive	Active status	to determine if the product should be made available for sale in Infigo
DefaultPrice	Item Price	The item price of the product
Available	Stock count	Amount of available remaining stock
Weight	Item Weight	NOTE: This is not from the getOffers API call, this is from the getProducts API and so requires (at the moment) a owner ID to be specified at a storefront level only. Sites with multiple product owners is not supported for retrieving weights at the moment.

As part of the plugin we have a number of settings that lets you control parts of this product sync

Import Product Images on sync - When enabled this setting will pull in all the images associated to the Veracore product
Veracore Product image Path prefix - In order to import the images as above, we ask that you populate this setting with the prefix URL of where the images are stored as the API only returns the relative path to them (e.g. https://images.veracore.com/)
Veracore Product Image Max File Size - Enter in here the maximum file size in bytes of the images you would like to be imported to help control the performance of the site. Any images over this size will not be imported.
Manage Inventory Tracking - Enable this setting if you want the Stock count to be pull in from Veracore and stored against the Infigo product. This will also set the Manage inventory method setting against the Infigo product to Track inventory when the product is created.
Enable Backorders - Enable this setting if you want the Infigo product setting Backorders to be set to Allow qty below 0

Customer Import

As part of our Connect: Veracore plugin we will allow you to sync customers from Veracore into Infigo. Unfortunately at the time this was not possible via the API so we had to utilise Veracores datasheet exports to achieve this.

Pre-requisites:

If you require customers to be put into departments and have controlled access permissions to certain products on the site then these need to be setup first, before you start to import customers. You can find more information on setting up departments and access permissions in Infigo here.

Make sure that your departments are mapped to the Veracore Category Access Group name using our Infigo Connect Link buttons, this is how they will be identified during the customer import.

Once you have your departments created and mapped to your Veracore Category Access Groups you can start the import process:

Download the Pre-Registered Users datasheet from Veracore. This can potentially be scheduled from within Veracore to be done automatically. Just ensure that the report contains the same important columns in the same locations as the table shown below.
Place the file into a pre-agreed directory on local machine.
Our windows application, Infigo Sync, will then pick up that file and import it into your Infigo platform automatically. You can of course decide just to import it manually if you wanted to control when this happens.
We then iterate through the CSV, looking for any existing Customers who's Infigo External IDs match the Veracore IDs, if we do not find a match we will create a new customer using the information provided.
When it finds a match it will check the Category Access Group name and then check the storefront for a matching department name/External ID.
When it finds a match it will ensure that user is assigned to that department.

At the moment we support information being passed in the format below and then map it to the corresponding Infigo properties

Column	Content	Veracore description	Infigo property
Column A	Customer Id	The ID of the Veracore user	Customer External ID
Column W	Category Access Group	The group the customer is part of in Veracore that controls visibility and access	Department Name & Department External ID

Product Categorization

As part of our Veracore integration we allow for the products that you sync from Veracore via the Products sync to also be assigned to categories so that you can mimic your Veracore product hierarchy structure in Infigo - essentially assigning all your products that need it into Categories and Sub Categories.

Again, with the Customer Import, for this part of the integration we had to use Veracore's datasheet exports to provide the category information, below are the steps for setting this up in Infigo:

Download the Offer Categorization datasheet from Veracore. This can potentially be scheduled from within Veracore to be done automatically. Just ensure that the report contains the same important columns in the same locations as the table shown below*.

*Row 1 - Column A must be Offer ID and Columns P - Q must be Level 1, Level 2, etc. Please also make sure the level columns are blank if no subcategories are being used.

Place the file into a pre-agreed directory on local machine. You must create an Upload Folder in Catfish found under Catfish > Printing > Upload Folders. Here is an example of folder:

Please contact the Help Desk if you need to access the Upload Folders

The Upload Folder must then be linked in the MIS VeraCore in admin within Catfish. To link it, go to the Sync Product Categories via Data sheet, and then select your Upload Folder from the dropdown. Then, setup the CSV naming convention, you can use a wildcard followed by an underscore. This must match in order for the sync to work. Then, select your default category template. *At the time of this writing, if using Arone, please set to Default.

Our windows application, Infigo Sync, will then pick up that file and import it into your Infigo platform automatically. You can of course decide just to import it manually if you wanted to control when this happens (see below for manual import).
The datasheet will contain an Offer ID (as shown below) that will link to a product in Veracore. It will also have a series of 'Levels' column that will determine the categories and sub-categories that need to be created and the product to be assigned to.
An Offer ID can exist on multiple rows in the datasheet if it should be assigned to multiple categories.
The import will iterate through the CSV file and for each Level it finds it will create a new category. And for each category it creates we will automatically assign the correct mapping value to ensure it is mapped to Veracore correctly.
The display order of the products is predetermined to the order in which they appear on the CSV file.

Manual Syncing

After you create your Upload Folder and link the folder in Connect: Veracore - simply go to the Upload Folder, and upload your CSV file. Attached to this article is a sample CSV.

At the moment we support the information in the datasheet to be provided in the following format and will map it to the corresponding Infigo properties:

Column	Content	Veracore	Infigo
Column A	Offer ID	The Product ID in Veracore	Product External ID
Columns P - V	Levels	Category structure the Order IDs are assigned to	Category External ID

Place Orders

When an order is placed in Infigo we will automatically trigger a order to be placed in Veracore.

As you have carried out all the steps above to ensure all the customers placing orders in Infigo have a mapping to customers in Veracore and similarly with the products when an order is placed we can easily let Veracore know who is placing an order for what.

Here we pass information like the billing and shipping address details, the shipping method the user selected in Infigo, any order costs including shipping, details about the customer placing the order, and then information about the products included in the order including the Veracore Offer ID, the quantity and the unit price.

Shipped Status update

The final piece of the integration supports updating the statuses of orders in Infigo to shipped and also passing updated order information like delivery method and tracking code back into Infigo.

For this we use the Veracore web service: getShippingCharge

This allows us to poll for all orders set to shipped within a specific time frame.

Within our plugin we allow for you to specify the number of days in the past for the first ship date that you would like us to poll for and also the number of days in the past for the last ship date. As per the example below this will check in Veracore for all orders that were set to ship between 30 days ago and 1 day ago.

Veracore then returns the list of orders set to shipped during this time, we then poll through each order and check against all open orders in Infigo. When the order is found we will update the tracking information, the delivery method and then set the order to shipped. This then in-turn can trigger a shipped notification email from Infigo that contains the delivery method and tracking information to the end customer.

Property Mapping