We are about to implement NAV Dynamics - I have been asked to create an e-commerce website that has some level of integration with NAV including product pricing and stock quantities fed to the Web database plus web user data fed to the NAV Contact CRM element. I have been advised Magento is not a good platform to use as the core databases of Nav (SQL and Magento (MySQL) can cause problems in data transfer - can anyone verify this or recommend a web platform that is compatible - I’m told NOP is a better option.
Hi Ken,
Welcome to DUG! 
You really have to consider what you want with this e-commerce website and what your ambitions are. I have done e-commerce integrations to both very simple off-the-shelve solutions, where the main interface was simple files. And to much more advanced using web services to read and write data into NAV. I wouldn’t even care what database the actual webshop runs on, if the website otherwise matches the requirement your company have.
And I know many who loves Magento, so if it otherwise lives up to your requirement then I would still take it into considerations.
Personally I would be looking for a solution, where you still have all the business logic in regards to pricing and inventory inside NAV. A lot of the e-commerce solutions out there have troubles supporting NAV’s more advanced pricing/discount setup. So you have to make sure that the way your company sets prices and discounts is supported by the e-commerce solution. Typically that’s the case for business-to-business webshops.
If the “business logic” (aka rules for calculating prices and create orders) are inside the webshop, and you’re changing this logic inside NAV, then you may also need to reprogram the actual webshop to support it.
Dynamicweb is one of the e-commerce solutions I personally recommend, if my clients want a good solution designed to be used for Microsoft Dynamics.
But I’m sure other members, have other preferences.
Thanks Erik - the problem is our products are very complex with lots of attributes (electronic components) we do not need all this info in NAV but we do need it in the web for engineers to make an informed choice so I see the product database as a separate database held between and and the Website with a common part number being the link that feeds the site with pricing from NAV. Having all the attributes in NAV would hinder the ERP /sales order process as there are 60k products - our staff could not possibly source all of the attributes of a product just to make a quote or place an order - all they need is a brief description , part number and 4 price levels in the ERP. Thanks I will take a look at Dynamicweb and see how well it is supported by developers over here in the UK as I need to employ a company to build and integrate this.
I can say that I actually worked with company who had 140K+ products. They too had all their specifications in a separate product attribute database. Not so much because of any limitations in storing it in NAV, but because it was integrated to a third party online it product information database, and they really didn’t need all this information in NAV.
They were still able to use a very low-end off-the-shelve shop. Their business was b-to-c, and they didn’t have very advanced pricing or discounts (except they updated the the prices automatically up to 3-4 times a day.
Last year we finalized an implementation for a customer with 3 mln + active items in product matrix and over 25 mln active price lists lines, updated every day partially from different sources. Their business is exactly selling electronic components. They decided to have all the attributes inside the database as a customized set of referenced tables, linked with standard item reference. Having that, they were able to search for items in the database using number of criteria when generating sales orders manually, as well as integrate it with their own web shop platform.