High-Level Overview

What is an E-Commerce Connector?

The Tinx E-Commerce Connector is an app developed by Dutch IT company Tinx. The app needs to be installed in Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central and can be found through the Microsoft Extension Marketplace / AppSource.

With this native connector, you can easily integrate several different e-commerce platforms / webshops with the enterprise resource planning (ERP) software of Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central (BC). All your existing master data, and newly added data in BC, can be synchronized to an e-commerce webshop, reducing the need for double data-entry. 

This information guide will help you set up the integration between your e-commerce webshop and BC, understand its features, and get the most out of this program and tool. With the extended Product Information Management (PIM) tool, which is part of our solution, you can maintain and control all your items in BC.


Our solution utilizes the default APIs of web platforms, whether this is a SOAP, REST or GraphQL protocol.
With a generic user interface, the Tinx connector allows you to map data between these two systems with ease!

 

Base tables are extended

Business Central is often seen as an all-in-one digital headquarters. Like many databases, you will find the following: tables that store important data, fields within those tables that highlight an individual piece of information, codeunits that contain instructions for how BC should handle and process that data and finally reports that can showcase performance or run certain bits of code.

After installing the Tinx app, you basically add new tables, fields, codeunits and reports to the database and extend already existing ones. For example, after installation you can find several Tinx fields added to the product page, such as 'Publish to Webshop' and 'Webshop Product ID'. These fields are used when sending product information via the connector. A brand new table would be the TINX Product table (11205274), that stores webshop product information. Acting like a buffer table, this allows us to sync the BC side of product information with a webshop.

 

Examples of standard BC tables that are extended with Tinx fields:

  • Customer
  • Contact
  • Item, Item Variant
  • Sales Header, including posted records such as Sales Shipment Header and Sales Invoice Header
  • Sales Line, including posted records such as Shipment Line and Sales Invoice Line

Supported platforms

Whilst our connector is fully able to work with (multiple) older versions of Microsoft Dynamics NAV (formally known as Navision), the functionality described throughout our online help is written primarily for BC Cloud, and therefore uses screenshots from that environment.