How Can Business Central APIs Be Used to Integrate E-Commerce Systems?

An e-commerce integration with Business Central should be designed around business processes and data ownership, rather than simply moving records between two systems. Business Central provides APIs that can be used to expose and consume business data, allowing an e-commerce platform to exchange information such as customers, products, sales orders and inventory-related data. A typical architecture might look like: E-Commerce Platform | v Integration Layer | +-------+-------+ | | v v Business Central Monitoring | +---- Customers +---- Products +---- Orders +---- Inventory The important architectural question is which system owns which data. For example, the e-commerce platform may own the online shopping experience while Business Central remains the system of record for financial transactions and fulfilment-related processes. The integration should therefore define clear ownership, identifiers, validation rules and synchronization responsibilities. Professionals should also consider authentication, API throttling/service limits, retries, duplicate prevention, error handling, idempotency, monitoring and asynchronous processing. A production integration should not assume that every API request succeeds. For example, if an order is successfully created in Business Central but the e-commerce application does not receive the response, blindly retrying the request could create a duplicate unless the integration has an appropriate idempotency strategy. For interviews, a strong answer should therefore move beyond "Business Central has APIs" and explain the integration architecture, data ownership, authentication, failure handling and monitoring strategy.