The integration should ensure that wherever possible the mandatory fields required by either system are contained in the data being exchanged. However, this should not be relied on. The receiving system should always validate the incoming data and either reject incomplete messages or deal with them appropriately, prompting a user within the WMS platform to add the missing information.
The sort of situations that your data validation should aim to avoid include:
- Products being created with duplicate barcodes
- Courier selection failing because an order was received without all the data that is required by the courier selection logic
- International orders held up because a product is missing the customs description needed for a CN22 customs label
The data validation processes should ensure that all the necessary information is available before the operational processes are started.
There may be that you want to give your warehouse users the discretion to edit some elements of the data received from the e-commerce platform. A typical example is the product weight; within the e-commerce platform the weight is often just the weight of the product, in the warehouse environment it's more useful to know the combined weight of the product and its packaging. If your warehouse processes give users the ability to edit the product weights within the WMS it's important that your integration ensures that amended weights aren't overwritten the next time an updated product definition is received from the e-commerce platform.