What the solution is
Experlogix Digital Commerce was called Aphix WebShop until a few years ago and comes from an Irish house now part of the American Experlogix group. The product is a SaaS platform where the store is hosted by the vendor, and where B2B selling to known customers is the centre of gravity.
The integration to Business Central is called Experlogix Cloud Connect and consists of cloud-based integration APIs that also serve the group's other products. It is therefore not an app you install and update in the ERP, but a service that talks to Business Central from the outside over REST or SOAP.
How the integration works
The documentation is more precise than most, and it is worth reading before comparing. Stock figures are shown live for logged-in B2B customers when the item page loads or refreshes. The customer's account details and delivery addresses are fetched when the customer logs in. The item catalogue, the prices and the stock figures for the open consumer part, by contrast, are imported on a schedule.
That split is the single most important fact about the solution. It means a B2B customer sees a stock figure that is correct now, but a price that is correct until the next import. How often that import runs determines how large the risk is that the store and the ERP disagree about the price, and that is a question that should have a number as its answer.
The documentation names the Business Central tables the integration uses, among them item, location, price list header and line, sales header, contact and customer. That is a useful sign the integration works on Business Central's own concepts rather than on a translation. A full Business Central user licence is required, meaning Essentials or Premium, and only Business Central online is documented.
Prices, discounts and agreements
Prices come from Business Central's price lists and are imported into the store. Customer-specific prices, quantity breaks and validity periods sit in the price list lines the integration reads, so the agreement you made in the ERP is the agreement the customer sees. It is simply not recalculated at every page view.
This is the classic transferred-result model, and it carries the scaling trap the catalogue warns about. Customers times items quickly becomes many rows to keep fresh. With many thousand customers, it is worth asking for a figure on how long a full import takes at your size.
Discount groups and product bundles we have not been able to document, and they therefore stand as not stated rather than as a no. That is a real difference: the solution may well handle them, we have simply found no written coverage. Ask for both to be demonstrated if they matter to you.
The order and the finance function
The order is written to Business Central's sales header, meaning as a sales order, and from there it continues in the ERP's own flow. Partial shipments, back orders and credit memos are therefore Business Central's responsibility.
Because the integration is a middleware service, there is a place where an order can sit and wait. That is not a weakness in itself, quite the opposite since it makes retry possible, but it makes it important to agree who monitors the queue, and what happens when an order fails on a data error rather than a network error.
VAT is in practice decided by the store for the open part of the selling. If you sell to consumers in several EU countries, OSS and IOSS is a question needing a concrete answer, and it should be asked in writing.
Who the solution fits
The solution fits a wholesaler or manufacturer in Europe selling to known customers and wanting round-the-clock self-service without building it themselves. The Irish and British presence makes support in a European time zone realistic, which is not a given across the catalogue.
It also fits if live stock figures matter more to your customers than live prices. That is a common situation in trade with stocked goods, where the price is agreed in advance but a wrong stock figure costs an order.
The solution fits less well if you run on-premises, or if the price has to be right to the second. There, the solutions that look the price up in Business Central along the way sit closer.
What to settle before you decide
Pricing is not public. Our bands are an estimate with low confidence and should be replaced by a quotation before any further calculation. Ask to have both the licence and Cloud Connect priced, because the integration is a separate service and not an app you get along the way.
Ask for the interval of the price import, and ask to have it written into the agreement. It is the one fact that determines how large the risk of selling at a wrong price is, and it is easier to get now than later.
Finally, ask to have it confirmed whether on-premises can be supported, and ask for discount groups and bundles to be demonstrated. Three written answers move the solution noticeably in the assessment, and all three are quick for the vendor to give.