Centralizing Product Content Across 3 Markets with Strapi and ERP Integration

About the client

The client sells modular furniture and storage systems through localized direct-to-consumer storefronts and major online marketplaces.

Its catalog included more than 2,400 SKUs and 18,000 regional content records. Each product could include technical specifications, regional pricing, compliance documents, assembly instructions, localized copy, media, and SEO metadata.

Dynamics 365 Business Central remained authoritative for operational product data. Strapi became the central hub for localized and channel-ready content. HubSpot consumed approved product taxonomy and campaign metadata for regional marketing automation.

Client feedback

“A product update used to take up to two weeks to appear correctly across every channel. Now the operational data arrives automatically, and our market teams can publish localized content the same day." — Head of E-commerce, German home and living brand

Business challenge

Product information was spread across Business Central, the previous CMS, marketplace feeds, spreadsheets, and internal dashboards.

Changes to dimensions, materials, pricing, care instructions, or compliance documentation were often entered several times. Updates reached channels at different speeds, causing inconsistent listings, marketplace rejections, and avoidable support requests.

The company considered a dedicated PIM, but Business Central already owned the operational product record. The missing layer was a flexible content platform that could combine ERP data with localized marketing content and deliver it to every customer-facing channel.

Why Bits Orchestra

The client chose Bits Orchestra for its ability to cover the full delivery stack in-house: headless CMS, .NET, Azure, React, and e-commerce.

Bits Orchestra has built and integrated content platforms since 2017, with hands-on experience across Strapi, Sanity, Contentful, and Kontent.ai. That headless CMS expertise was backed by a proven e-commerce track record, including DasParts, an online platform delivered for a Canadian auto parts retailer.

The team also brought deep CMS engineering experience as a Top 3 Kentico partner in Eastern Europe, giving the client one partner for content architecture, systems integration, storefront development, and cloud delivery.

Solution

Bits Orchestra first defined ownership at the field level.

Business Central stayed authoritative for SKUs, dimensions, materials, inventory, and pricing. Strapi managed localized descriptions, media, compliance content, merchandising copy, and SEO fields. ERP-owned fields were read-only in Strapi and updated only through the integration service.

The integration architecture included:

• Azure Functions polling changed Business Central records every 15 minutes, chosen over webhooks to control ERP load and keep retries batch-based;
• Azure Service Bus for message delivery, retries, and dead-letter handling;
• idempotency and version checks to prevent duplicate or outdated updates;
• GraphQL delivery to React storefronts and the .NET marketplace-feed service;
• Azure Blob Storage and Front Door for product media;
• HubSpot synchronization for approved product categories and market tags;
• Strapi 5 Enterprise localization, Review Workflows, role-based permissions, and Audit Logs;
• SSR, localized URLs, hreflang, canonical rules, and automated XML sitemaps.

Price and stock used during checkout were retrieved separately from Business Central through a near-real-time lookup rather than the 15-minute content pipeline. The existing commerce layer continued to manage cart, checkout, payments, and order capture.

Failed integration records triggered alerts and could be reviewed and replayed through an operations dashboard. The remaining 0.4% of records that did not process automatically were resolved through this workflow.

The structured content model also supported an Azure OpenAI-based quality workflow. A 200-SKU pilot checked localized content for missing attributes, inconsistent terminology, and untranslated compliance text, reducing QA time by 31%. Market editors reviewed every suggestion before publication.

Delivery approach

The project began with a source-of-truth audit and field mapping across the ERP, CMS, spreadsheets, and storefronts. The team validated the model against 250 representative products before migrating the full catalog.

Strapi ran on Azure App Service with PostgreSQL. Azure Key Vault and managed identities protected service credentials, while scoped GraphQL tokens, query-depth limits, Audit Logs, and automated schema, contract, synchronization, and localization tests supported security and reliability.

Three markets launched newly built storefronts within ten weeks of frontend kickoff, followed by two weeks of monitored post-launch support.

Before and after

Team

Bits Orchestra assigned a cross-functional team with deep expertise across infrastructure, integration, and storefront delivery to ensure the platform could scale across markets and channels.

The engagement included:

• Project manager — Coordinated the two-phase delivery timeline, managed stakeholder alignment between Business Central, Strapi, and the three market teams, and oversaw the transition from build to monitored post-launch support.
• Solution architect — Defined field-level ownership between ERP and CMS, designed the integration architecture (Azure Functions, Service Bus, idempotency patterns), and validated the content model against 250 representative products before full catalog migration.
• Three backend developers — Built the ERP polling service and message-queue infrastructure, developed the GraphQL API layer, configured Strapi 5 Enterprise features (localization, review workflows, role-based permissions, Audit Logs), and implemented the HubSpot synchronization and AI-powered QA workflow.
• Two frontend developers — Built three production storefronts in React with server-side rendering, localized URLs, hreflang and canonical rules, automated XML sitemaps, and shared the GraphQL content layer across markets.
• QA engineer — Validated the integration pipeline, tested storefront rendering and localization across markets, audited permissions and security controls, and monitored the 0.4% of records that required manual resolution through the operations dashboard.

Summary

The client gained a governed product-content hub without replacing the ERP that already owned operational data. Strapi 5 connected localized content, storefronts, marketplace feeds, and marketing systems while giving the business a reliable base for AI-assisted quality control and future product discovery.