Inventory Planner provides a large range of integrations, enabling customers to connect to the tools they need to run their business.

The integrations can be classed by who built them, as well as what kind of platform they connect to. This article will discuss the different integrations and the differences between them.

Some integrations are built and maintained in-house, while others are developed by third parties.

This table explains the difference between the two kinds of connectors.

Management systems include inventory management (IMS) systems, warehouse management (WMS) systems, and enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems.

Management systems are centralized locations which list your current stock and orders. They typically record the movement of inventory in and out of your business, letting you know how much you have available to sell at any point, keep a record of your sales and purchase orders, and may have other features like accounting and planning tools.

Sales channels are platforms that allow you to list and sell your products. There are two kinds of sales channels:

Ecommerce platforms host web stores, where you have your own website and trade with your customers directly. When you sell through an ecommerce platform, you can control the look and feel of your web store.

Marketplaces are dedicated websites where you and other sellers list your goods for sale in one central location. The end buyer trades with the marketplace as an intermediary. When you sell through a marketplace, you generally do not have much control over the way your products are presented.

Fulfillment platforms facilitate shipping to your customers, usually by linking your management or sales platforms to different shipping carriers.

Accounting platforms allow you to manage your financial information. They often contain sales, purchasing and product information, with a focus on their impact on your business's financial reports.

Marketing integrations provide insight into your products' performance, letting you make decisions on advertising, promotions and pricing.

If you have multiple platforms which are already connected to one another, it's not always necessary or recommended to connect each one to Inventory Planner as doing so may result in duplicated information.

If you have an IMS or an ERP, we recommend only connecting that to Inventory Planner.

Connecting just your IMS or ERP means Inventory Planner will report by warehouse, not sales channel.

If you don't have an IMS or ERP, you would connect each sales channel to Inventory Planner individually. The types of data that can be synced is more limited, and you may need to perform some additional configuration to created combined warehouses and listings.

The table below lists the typical data flow for each type of systems, though it can vary from integration to integration.