What the solution is
Nav-to-Net is a webstore from Digital Vantage Point in Canada, built exclusively for Business Central and for the older NAV line. The product's hallmark is that the store is set up and controlled inside the ERP rather than in a separate administration module. The current version is called Nav-to-Net 10 and is obtained from Microsoft Marketplace.
That makes the solution one of the few in the catalogue where Business Central is not a data source beside the store, but the store's own backend. There is no middleware, no duplication and no ongoing reconciliation between two systems, because there are not two systems.
How the integration works
Strictly speaking there is no integration to maintain. The store is an extension of Business Central, and an order placed on the web is created directly in the ERP. The item card, the customer card and the price agreements are the same records a salesperson works in, and they are not copied anywhere.
The consequence for operations is large. There is no synchronisation that can stall overnight, no queue of failed orders and no failure mode where the store shows a price the ERP does not know. In return, the store's response time depends on Business Central, and the web tier that serves the pages has to be hosted somewhere. Settle early who operates that tier and what has been agreed about uptime.
Both Business Central online and the older installations on your own servers are supported, which makes the solution relevant to companies that have not moved to the cloud yet. That list is shorter than it was a few years ago, but it is not empty.
Prices, discounts and agreements
The pricing logic is Business Central's own. Customer-specific prices, agreed prices, volume discounts, discount groups, customer-specific assortment and credit limit are not renderings of the ERP setup but the ERP setup itself, read directly. It is the strongest version of the mechanism this catalogue measures.
Because there is no flat price matrix, the scaling trap does not exist either. Many customers times many items costs nothing extra in maintenance, and that is the most important difference between this solution and the synchronised alternatives.
The price for it is that the store has no independent campaign layer. If a campaign is to be run, it is created as a price or a discount in Business Central. For a company where the finance function owns pricing, that is tidy. For a marketing department that wants to work freely, it is a straitjacket, and it should be said out loud before the choice is made.
The order and the finance function
The order is a sales order in Business Central from the moment it is placed. There is no intermediary that has to create it first, and therefore there is no state where the order exists in the store but not in the accounts.
Partial shipments, back orders, cancelled lines, returns and credit memos follow the ERP's own processes and require no special setup in the store. For a finance function this is the most predictable of the models the catalogue describes.
VAT is calculated by Business Central. Reconciling the payment provider's settlement is still a separate job, but it is made easier by the payment record and the ledger entry sitting in the same system.
Who the solution fits
The solution fits a wholesaler or manufacturer where Business Central is the system everyone works in, and where the webstore should be a channel into the ERP rather than a universe of its own. If you sell to known customers on agreed terms, you get the most direct route from price agreement to displayed price that the catalogue contains.
It also fits if you run on-premises. The number of solutions that still support that is limited, and this is one of them.
The solution fits less well for a brand that lives off its visual expression and its editorial content. Design and content are the weakest part, and a separate CMS alongside is not an unnatural combination, but then there are two systems to run.
What to settle before you decide
Pricing is not public. Our bands are an estimate against comparable solutions in the same class, and they carry low confidence. Ask for a quotation covering the licence, the web hosting and the implementation, because those three items hang together more closely here than in an ordinary SaaS solution.
Ask to have it written down who hosts and monitors the web tier, and what the response time is at your number of concurrent users. That is the one technical risk in an architecture where the ERP is the store's backend.
Finally, ask to see the product data work in practice. The item card in Business Central is thin, and when the store reads directly from it, the question of images, descriptions and attributes becomes one that needs an answer before the project starts. A separate product information system is a real option here.