Is Solving Salesforce Catalog Integration Frustrating You? Introducing… Nagual!

November 07, 2019

Here’s a classic problem that, too often, companies encounter when their Salesforce Commerce Cloud development team begins their development: getting your catalog of products from your current system into Salesforce Commerce Cloud seamlessly is a pain-in-the-knee.

Why is it so challenging to move your catalog from your current database into SFCC? For a few reasons:

Since companies using SFCC tend to have large catalogs, fundamentally, moving hundreds or thousands of products from one system to another is a non-trivial challenge.
SFCC does not store products in a relationship database but uses the smartly subtle design choice of XML files for catalog information instead. As a result, the export-to-import challenge isn’t a database move but instead must deal with the fun universe of XML file formats.
Systems that do such exports into the SFCC formats are usually components of very large product information management (PIM) systems; and if you’re not using one already, there’s no good solution. Plus these systems tend to be absurdly expensive.
Teams that do SFCC integrations, being composed of software developers, tend to want to build their own home-grown solutions. Why? Well, what software developers do is build — and, as a result, they love building their own solutions to problems that come up. To be clear, the instinct of the software developer to build-build-build is a ying and a yang, a bug and a feature — it is simultaneously what attracts talent to become software developers, that urge to build something wonderful, but it also leads to the “not invented here” syndrome as well.

What’s the solution? We’d love to introduce you, and the rest of the world, to… Nagual.

Here at United Virtualities, one aspect of our culture is our love of… well, taking any task that needs to be done repetitively, and standardize it. And, having done endless Salesforce Commerce Cloud development and building, we’ve faced this problem many times: a client hires us to develop their site on SFCC, and how the heck can we integrate their 4,700-item product catalog into the SFCC build? We built Nagual precisely to solve that problem.

Currently integrating with a few classic PIM platforms — like Netsuite and SAP — as well as using the universal standards of CSV files so it can work with any platform out there, Nagual takes your current catalog and imports it into the XML file standards that are needed for SFCC and then, bam, imports it. The heart of Nagual is the ability to accept and work with many different formats, and standardize them all into the needed XML files for SFCC.

Of course, no system is perfect. We wish it could work with just the push of a magical button and it’s all done. There is still some amount of manual work involved because, well, huge catalogs of products always have their idiosyncrasies. But, we estimate that Nagual saves about 92% of the time necessary for importing product catalogs into Salesforce Commerce Cloud.

Finally, if you were wondering why we chose the name, it was because our world class Salesforce Commerce Cloud team in Mexico built it, and they chose the name Nagual, to honor an ancient Mesoamerican god. Nagual was traditionally believed to be able to change into many shapes and forms — a fitting name for a system, built from the ground up to work with many different catalog formats and systems.