THE CHALLENGE

A privately-held consumer health products company had grown to the stage where it was processing thousands of orders per day for its dietary supplements and related services. The company had set up a close integration between Shopify (which powered its eCommerce site) and Salesforce Sales Cloud, used by its customer service representatives (CSRs) to create and update customer accounts, input orders, and help customers with their inquiries. 

Yet something had gone wrong: more and more frequently, CSRs were being locked out of Salesforce records they needed to access. This, obviously, led to a significant decrease in the quality of customer service—and equally as bad, numerous events in the Shopify system were no longer being received by Salesforce, creating significant data synchronization problems which had to be manually rectified by CSRs.

THE SOLUTION 

The company discovered that at the root of the problem was a third-party connector designed to forward events in Shopify to Salesforce. Poorly-architected, this connector mishandled many of the updates from Shopify, leading to high numbers of forwarding failures and thus high numbers of retry requests, which in turn prompted repeated system locks on records within Salesforce.

Based on its extensive experience solving integration issues with Salesforce implementations and its large team of certified MuleSoft developers and architects, Big Compass was called in to diagnose the problem. Working closely with the client and with its Salesforce systems integration partner, the Big Compass team designed and implemented a new architecture using a combination of Salesforce Platform Events—a data messaging system used to integrate business processes within Salesforce and between Salesforce and external systems—and MuleSoft’s Anypoint Platform CloudHub, which now serves as the primary point of integration between Salesforce and Shopify. The CloudHub-based integration polls Shopify for new events, and forwards them as a bundle to Salesforce. To keep tabs on all this, the team also set up alerts in MuleSoft’s Runtime Manager, which will notify IT admins if error counts exceed a specific threshold or if connectivity is lost between Shopify and Salesforce.

THE RESULTS

After only two months of design and development and another month of testing, the team completed the new integration—while also introducing the client to the flexibility and power of MuleSoft. The company’s IT staff can now see the flow of events between Shopify and Salesforce (a big improvement from the “black box” nature of the previous connector), and can catch errors and re-synchronize data objects as necessary. What’s more, abnormal lock outs of records have stopped completely, and as a result, this health products company is benefiting not only from well-synchronized data in both Shopify and Salesforce, but also from having CSRs who are able to fulfill their critical roles in ensuring customer satisfaction.

And with tens of thousands of orders a day now flowing smoothly through the system, that’s a lot of satisfaction.

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"Big Compass proved early on in the project that they were not only knowledgeable about Mulesoft's technical capabilities, but also had brought experience in integrating CRM with E-Commerce platforms in the past. Once we nailed down the architecture, their team worked hard to hit our aggressive timeline to ensure we were set up in advance of our busiest season. Huge shoutout to Jared, who suffered through many late night Slack messages from me!"

-Michael Vukovich, CEO of Wise Wolves