Bandai Namco · SAP + Shopify middleware
A well-known Japanese entertainment brand was running their Shopify Plus store through a third-party integration app to sync with their SAP backend. The app handled orders, inventory, pricing, and catalog. In theory. In practice, a significant portion of orders never made it to SAP automatically and required manual intervention. Fraudulent orders were sent to SAP without any filtering. Discounts were mapped to the wrong fields, forcing the operations team to manually recalculate and reassign prices for every order. The integration was a black box: when something broke, there was no visibility, no logs, and no way to intervene without going through the vendor.
I designed and built a custom middleware to replace it entirely. The middleware connects directly to Bandai's SAP database and handles four bidirectional sync modules: catalog, pricing, stock, and orders. Each module runs on a configurable cron schedule, has its own logging system accessible via a custom admin dashboard, and includes validation rules to protect against bad data reaching the store. Price sync validates against zero-price conditions and puts affected products in draft automatically. Order sync filters fraudulent orders before sending to SAP, maps discounts correctly at the line-item level, and handles Mexico-specific fiscal invoice requests through a custom checkout field and automated email flow.
The integration was later adapted and replicated for a second Bandai store with different business rules: products sold in boxes on Shopify mapped to individual units in SAP, separate price lists per store, and distinct catalog logic. Not a copy-paste, a separate implementation built on the same foundation.
The result was the elimination of all manual sync processes that had been running daily, full visibility into every operation through structured logs, and a custom solution the client owned entirely with no third-party dependency.
- Stack: Node.js, Express, TypeScript, SAP Integration, SQL Server, Shopify Admin API