Systems Integration - Making websites talk to each other

Over the past decades we have evolved as a web agency and have needed to keep up with technologies and trends. Not only have we have grown as a team, but our skillsets, knowledge-base and the quality of what we produce has expanded and improved.

Yes, of course we can produce award-winning websites, but a lot of what we do these days is systems integration, something that is far more complex that standard builds and, as developers, very rewarding.

In this article I’ll explain to the layperson what systems integration actually is.

ChatGPT sums it up quite well; "System integration is the process of connecting and unifying different software, hardware, and other systems to work together as a single, cohesive unit."

We could simplify this as "making websites talk to things", but that makes it sound easy.

So, let’s look at some examples that are web-related:

A very common one is payment gateways that link to e-commerce websites such as online shops. These can sometimes be included easily within the shopping platform, but other times need something bespoke written by developers like us in order to get the two systems integrated, or 'talking'.

Warehousing integration is also popular; we have linked websites and online shops to warehouses for reasons such as stock-control, customised label printing and shipping automation. These can be through ERP software (if this doesn’t mean anything to you then it doesn’t matter), or again something bespoke that we code from scratch.

Similarly web-based systems can be linked to accountancy platforms such as Xero, QuickBooks or Sage. This means that invoicing and so on can be automated. Typically, when clients start integrating websites to accounting platforms, they also want the payment gateways and warehousing all in sync. If we start to factor in multiple payment gateways (think Direct Debit, PayPal or debit/credit card options) and the ordering that processes take place, there can be a lot to consider. For example, whether stock levels are handled by the website, warehouse, ERP or somewhere else.

A lot of companies store their core information in CRMs, and quite rightly so. Common examples of CRMs include Microsoft Dynamics, HubSpot and Microsoft Salesforce. Another system integration that we offer is linking websites to these CRMs, again often having to do it from scratch via their API (interface), rather than relying buying a plugin or extension. This means that a website can act as a user portal and sync the data with the CRM periodically.

Recently we’ve started integrating AI in to our web systems as well, using it to aid productivity or improve the user experience. A good example is a website that has 'make this content simple so that it can be understood by a 10-year-old' and 'summarise this page' buttons.

If you start mixing all of the above together, you can see that the complexity increases exponentially. Add in a custom-written user portal, progressive web apps (PWAs), a single login shared between multiple accounts, offline browsing and higher security requirements, it should be clear that there is a lot to consider.

This is systems integration, and this is what we do at Webbed Feet.

In short, we do a lot of planning, and often, extensive coding behind-the-scenes so that the end user has something working as, as ChatGPT says, "a single cohesive unit".