Reference
What is System integration?
Integration is connecting your site to another system — accounting, dispatch, CRM, an ERP or a supplier feed. Each one is a small project with its own authentication, failure modes and testing, and it is the most commonly under-scoped part of a build.
Also called: third-party integration
Why integrations overrun
- Documentation that is incomplete, out of date, or absent
- No sandbox, so every test touches production data
- Rate limits discovered under real traffic
- Data that does not map cleanly between the two systems
- The other vendor changing something without notice
What a careful integration includes
- Timeouts on every call, so a hung third party does not hang your page
- A defined behaviour when the other system is down — queue, degrade, or fail visibly
- Retries with backoff for transient errors, and none for permanent ones
- Redacted logging, so failures can be diagnosed after the fact
The question to settle before quoting
Which system is the source of truth? Two systems both believing they are authoritative is the most common cause of data drift, and it is a decision rather than a technical problem.
Where this is covered in depth
A definition can only go so far. Writing a website brief that gets you comparable quotes covers this properly — 3 minutes, free, no email required.
Who wrote this
Anas Bin Masud builds e-commerce sites and does technical SEO for businesses in the UK, Canada and Pakistan. These definitions come from client work rather than from a content brief — where an entry describes a mistake, it is usually one found on a real site. More about how I work.