Connecting a store to an ERP or a CRM is rarely the hard part. Keeping it working for years is. Here are the five ways I most often see integrations fail, and what to do about each.
1. The other side changes
APIs get new versions, fields get renamed and old endpoints get retired. Pin the API version you use, subscribe to the vendor’s changelog, and validate the shape of every payload before you act on it.
2. Failures are silent
If a sync fails and nobody is told, it’s only a matter of time before a customer notices first. Log every run, alert on errors, and alert on silence too: no runs in six hours is also a problem.
3. No retries, or retries that duplicate
Networks hiccup. Retry with a backoff, but make every write idempotent so a retry updates the same order instead of creating a second one.
4. Data doesn’t survive the trip
My favorite example: postal codes stored as numbers. 02134 quietly becomes 2134 and shipping labels go wrong. Watch out for leading zeros, international addresses, character encoding and time zones.
5. Nobody owns it
Write down which system owns each field, what happens when two systems disagree, and who gets the alert at 7 a.m. A one-page runbook beats tribal knowledge every time.
If your integration doesn’t have logs and a dashboard, you’ll find out it’s broken from a customer.
