Integration Layer

What’s on this page?

Tulip is a purely connected and data-driven application. Tulip brings years of research experience in presenting an associate with rich product details, customer profiles, and transaction history data that is laid out in an intuitive format. Thousands of Tulip users across numerous brands across the world enjoy having context-aware and personalized conversations with their customers.

Designing an integration with Tulip depends on a couple of factors:

  • Type of data entities being synchronized (such as Products or Customers),
  • The specific vendor partner/system that serves as the master source of record for the data (such as Oracle Relate as CRM or Digital Product Master); and
  • The integration capabilities within the client’s ecosystem (such as IBM Integration service bus, or Mulesoft platform for integration layers).

Tulip provides a flexible set of APIs and tools within Tulip’s Retail Integration Hub. This enables Tulip clients to synchronize data and extend deep integrations into existing infrastructure and environments.

The Tulip Commerence Engine, and Retail Integration Hub links Store Associate Hardware with Existing IT Systems.

The Tulip Platform integrates with a retailer’s cloud or on-premise systems with pre-built or custom-built integration connectors within Tulip’s Integration Hub. The Integration Hub enables a breadth of capabilities for data synchronization between Tulip and Client systems. This enables an architecture that permits integration patterns that can be chosen by partners and clients for synchronizing retail data in multiple ways.

Tulip’s Integration Hub is composed of integration capabilities that are designed with industry-proven patterns and best practices in mind. It hosts a highly available and secure integration services layer for inbound and outbound data integrations.

Tulip has extensive experience building connectors to best of breed retail OMS, CRM, POS, and PIM solutions.

For more information on different integration methods available from Tulip, see Integration Methods.

Integrating with the Tulip Cloud Platform

At Tulip, the main integration patterns for data synchronization with client systems falls under the following two categories:

  1. Caching all applicable Retail data within Tulip's cloud backend to ensure the app is able to access information quickly from Tulip Cloud when needed. And to be able to relate entities for task creation, linking entities (sharing products, adding customers to orders etc), as well as usage analytics.
  2. Updating Client's master systems during specific use cases when a synchronous update/creation of a key data point is to be applied (e.g. a Customer profile).

Access to cached copies of the retail data entities enables Tulip to persist data securely and access it through defined APIs, which do not need to be customized each time for a different implementation, thereby speeding up the implementation timeline. Moreover, the indexing of information on Tulip’s cloud platform makes it possible to search the static information (images, key values for products for instance) in the fastest manner possible.

Types of Data Entities Tulip Can Synchronize

Tulip can synchronize the following data entities:

  • Catalog - Including product details, categories, images and their translated equivalents to drive cross region localized behavior
  • Prices - Localized prices per regions, countries or stores
  • Inventory - Near real-time inventory availabilities
  • Customer - Tulip stores customer profile data securely while complying with major information systems and compliance standards
  • Order History - Past customers purchases data within client’s environment
  • Associates - Information about associates from each store
  • Stores - Information about each store
  • And many others to enable rich Clienteling features!

Plan for Data Integration with Tulip

Tulip will work with client Business and IT team counterparts to align on how to empower Tulip with data from client master systems.

We encourage leveraging existing data integration practices and data-interchange mechanisms already in place within client cloud or on-premise infrastructures to synchronize data with the Tulip Platform.

Here are a few things to consider when determining the integration approach

  • Depending on the use cases that the client wishes to enable in the store experience, outline the systems that will source the key data entities. For example: Customer record, Product and Variant, Pricing and Inventory (Online and store specific) records etc.
  • Consider aligning with the Tulip data formats for file-based or API-based integrations.
  • Outline partner systems that are not directly managed by client IT teams, but persist data in client partner remote cloud systems that will power Tulip. There is a good chance Tulip already integrates with those best of breed partners in other implementations. These could include POS systems, customer intelligence and task assignment systems (for store associates), retail PIM or commerce digital systems, etc.
  • Determine the cadence of data synchronization for major entities. Tulip recommends a once a day synchronization for static data entities like Products, Prices, Variants, Associates and Stores; near real-time sychronization for Customer updates, Inventory values; and synchronous real time data interfaces to Transactions (Payment and Checkout) use cases.

Later sections of this documentation explain current methods available for clients to integrate data to and from Tulip.

Integration Methods

Tulip provides following methods for integrating to client’s environment. In general, there are three methods supported:

Graphical representation of Tulip and the Client integrating usingnn the three methods.

In the following sections, each method is described with real scenarios at Tulip.

File-Based Integration Method

Clients send simple and standard CSV or JSON formatted files to import data to Tulip platforms. Currently, Tulip provides certain file formats that clients can use to send their data. The file is stored in SFTP servers and automatically imported to Tulip overnight.

Examples include importing information about Stores, Products, Variants, Prices, Inventory, Employees, Customers, etc.

For details, see File-Based Direct Integrations.

RESTful APIs Integration Method

API integration refers to the method where clients use Tulip-provided endpoints using RESTful API calls to interact with Tulip Apps. Our Bulk API and Direct API are the components provided for such capabilities.

For details, see API-Based Bulk Integrations.

Connector (Middleware) Integration Method

Connectors (or middleware) refer to applications that link Tulip to client’s cloud-based software systems. There is a diverse set of software that clients use, and Tulip integrates with many of them to import (outbound) and export (inbound) data to provide a seamless experiences for clients.

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