Let's be honest. Nobody starts a business dreaming about data synchronization. You started yours to sell great products, build a brand, and grow. But somewhere along the way, the operations side of things got complicated — and now a chunk of your day is eaten up by tasks that frankly shouldn't exist.
If you're running BigCommerce as your storefront and Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central as your ERP, and the two aren't connected, you already know what I'm talking about.
The Problem Nobody Talks About Enough
Here's what a typical day looks like without integration:
An order comes in on BigCommerce. Great! Someone has to open Business Central and manually enter that order. Then they have to check inventory, update it in BigCommerce, hope the numbers match, and move on to the next one. By the time they're done, there are fifteen more orders waiting. And somewhere in the middle of all that, a customer emails asking why they were charged for something that's out of stock.
Sound dramatic? It isn't. This is just Tuesday for a lot of growing eCommerce businesses.
The frustrating part isn't the workload — it's that none of this work actually moves the business forward. It's just maintenance. It's keeping two systems from fighting each other. And every hour spent on it is an hour not spent on marketing, customer relationships, or figuring out your next big product.
What Changes When You Connect the Two Systems
Integration isn't a magic wand, but it's pretty close. When BigCommerce and Business Central are properly connected, data flows between them automatically — in real time, in both directions. Here's what that actually means for your day-to-day:
You stop maintaining two product catalogs
Right now, if you update a product price in Business Central, someone has to remember to update it in BigCommerce too. Miss that step and your storefront is showing the wrong price. With integration, you change it once and it updates everywhere. Same goes for descriptions, variants, new SKUs — everything stays in sync without anyone babysitting it.
Your inventory numbers actually mean something
There's nothing worse than a customer placing an order for something you don't have. With integration, your BigCommerce storefront pulls live inventory data straight from Business Central. What customers see is what you actually have — whether you're running one warehouse or managing stock across multiple locations. And because the data is accurate, your demand forecasting gets better too.
Orders don't sit in a queue waiting for someone to process them
The moment a customer checks out, that order lands in Business Central. Ready to fulfill. No queue, no manual entry, no one coming in on Monday morning to discover a weekend's worth of unprocessed orders. You can even support models like buy-online-pickup-in-store without the operational headache, because both systems are always on the same page.
Your team sees the same customer, not two different versions
When customer data lives in two separate systems, it drifts. An address gets updated in one place but not the other. A payment term gets changed in Business Central but the storefront still shows the old one. Integration keeps a single, shared customer profile — purchase history, contact details, payment terms — accurate across both platforms. Your sales team, your support team, and your finance team all work from the same information.
Customers stop emailing you to ask where their order is
Shipment and tracking data syncs back to BigCommerce automatically. Customers can check their order status themselves through a self-service portal. Your support inbox gets quieter. Your team gets to focus on conversations that actually need a human.
Your finance team finally has clean numbers
Invoice data, payment records, and tax information sync between the two systems without anyone manually moving them. Your accounts receivable stays current. Cash flow visibility improves. Tax season stops being a scramble. And your finance team can stop spending half their week reconciling data that should have matched in the first place.
The Bigger Picture: What Integration Does for Your Business
It's easy to think of integration as an operational fix — a way to cut down on manual work. And it is that. But the impact goes deeper than saved hours.
It makes your data reliable. When your storefront and your ERP are always in sync, every decision you make — buying, forecasting, pricing, staffing — is grounded in accurate information. Small data errors compound into big strategic mistakes. Clean data makes better businesses.
It lets you grow without adding headcount just to manage data. Scaling manually means hiring more people to do more data entry. Scaling with integration means your systems handle the volume increase while your team focuses on the work that actually requires human judgment.
It opens the door to new channels. When Business Central is your single operational hub and everything connects to it, adding a new sales channel — a marketplace, a B2B portal, a second storefront — becomes a manageable project instead of an operational nightmare.
It quietly improves the customer experience. Accurate inventory means fewer post-purchase disappointments. Faster order processing means quicker delivery. Real-time tracking means fewer anxious customers. None of this is flashy, but all of it builds the kind of trust that turns one-time buyers into loyal ones.
Choosing the Right Integration: What Actually Matters
Not all integration solutions are the same, and the differences matter more than vendors usually admit. Here's what's worth paying attention to:
How many touchpoints does it cover? Basic order sync is easy. The hard part is everything else — refunds, partial shipments, credit memos, custom pricing for specific customer groups, multi-location inventory. A real integration handles all of it, not just the straightforward cases.
Does it go both ways? One-directional integrations create new problems. You need changes in Business Central to reflect in BigCommerce, and changes in BigCommerce to flow back to Business Central. Anything less than bidirectional is a half-solution.
Is it cloud-based? On-premise integration middleware is infrastructure you have to manage, maintain, and worry about. Cloud-hosted integration scales with you, requires no infrastructure investment, and is generally more reliable.
How is your data protected? Your integration is moving customer data, pricing, financial records, and order information. Enterprise-grade encryption isn't optional. Neither is the absence of arbitrary record-volume limits that force you to upgrade plans as you grow.
Can it be customized? Every business does something a little differently. Custom fields, unusual pricing structures, specific business rules — your integration needs to flex around your workflows, not force you to change them.
What happens when something breaks? Things break. The question is how fast they get fixed and whether you're on your own when they do. Support that's included — not sold as a premium add-on — is worth a lot when you're troubleshooting an order sync issue at 11pm before a big sale.
How fast can you go live? Weeks are acceptable. Months are not. A well-designed connector built specifically for BigCommerce and Business Central should have you up and running in days.
i95Dev Connect: Built for Exactly This
i95Dev has been connecting eCommerce platforms with ERP systems for a long time — over 200 businesses across more than 25 industries in 15-plus countries. That's not a marketing number; it means they've seen the edge cases, solved the weird problems, and built a solution that handles real-world complexity, not just demo scenarios.
Their Connect platform covers 150-plus data touchpoints between BigCommerce and Business Central out of the box. It's cloud-hosted, bidirectional, secured with AES encryption, and has no caps on record volume. Support comes with the product — not as an upsell.
Deployment takes days, not months. And if you want to see it working before you commit to anything, there's a free trial.
They're also building an AI-native version of Connect — one that makes setup faster and ongoing management smarter. If that's interesting to you, there's an early-access waitlist you can join now.
Where Do You Go From Here?
If you've been running BigCommerce and Business Central as two separate islands, you already know it's not sustainable long-term. The question is just how much longer you want to keep patching it manually.
The businesses that connect their systems early don't just save time — they make better decisions, grow more cleanly, and build operations that scale without breaking. The ones that wait tend to wait until something goes badly wrong.
You don't have to wait for that.
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