What the solution is
WebSell comes from NitroSell in Ireland and is built for companies selling both in a physical shop and online. Besides Business Central, the platform integrates with point-of-sale systems such as Retail Management Hero, Windward System Five and Lightspeed Retail, and that is what gives the product its character.
Storefront, backend and integration come from the same vendor, and everything is hosted by the vendor. The subscription is split into tiers by revenue, where customer-specific prices and the bulk ordering tools first appear on the tier above entry level.
How the integration works
The vendor describes Business Central as the system of record for the whole commerce setup. Items, prices, stock, customers and orders are kept aligned between the ERP, the point of sale and the webstore, and a change in the ERP takes effect in the store automatically.
This is a synchronisation model rather than lookups along the way, and it is the right model when the same stock figure has to be shown both online and at a counter. The store becomes fast and independent of the ERP's response time, and the price is that freshness is as good as the synchronisation is set up to be.
Only Business Central online is documented. It is worth noting that the point-of-sale systems WebSell also integrates with run on local servers, so the technique for working against a local environment exists at the vendor. If you run Business Central on-premises, that is therefore a question worth asking rather than assuming the answer to.
Prices, discounts and agreements
Prices and discounts come from Business Central and are transferred to the store as a result. The agreed price, the quantity break and the validity period are therefore the ones in the ERP, but they are not recalculated every time a customer opens a page.
Customer-specific prices are a tier feature. On the entry tier there is a catalogue, order capture, payment and fulfilment, but not customer-specific prices. That is the single most important fact for a budget comparison, because a B2B setup in practice starts one tier higher than the price list first suggests.
Discount groups and product bundles we have not been able to document and have therefore set as not stated rather than as a no. Ask for them to be demonstrated if they matter. The store's own campaign layer exists, but it is not where the strength lies.
The order and the finance function
The order is created as a sales order in Business Central, and from there it runs in the ERP's own flow. For a retail business it is particularly worth noting that the same customer and the same item are used across shop and web, so a return does not end up in two different registers.
Payment is charged at checkout. Reconciling the payment provider's settlement against the general ledger is not described as part of the solution, and with both shop payments and web payments in the same accounts it becomes an item that needs an owner.
VAT is in practice decided in the store. If you sell to consumers in several countries, the VAT setup should be reviewed concretely, and OSS should have a written answer.
Who the solution fits
The solution fits a retail business on Business Central with both shops and a webstore, tired of maintaining items and prices in two places. That is the problem the product is built to solve, and it solves it more closely than the pure B2B platforms in the catalogue.
It also fits a company with both consumer selling and a smaller business-to-business trade, where customer-specific prices are an addition rather than the whole business.
The solution fits less well for a pure B2B wholesaler with complicated pricing logic and many thousand customers. There are solutions in the catalogue where the pricing logic is the load-bearing part, and where it is not a feature on a particular subscription tier.
What to settle before you decide
Pricing is quoted on request and split into tiers by revenue. Our bands are an estimate with low confidence. Ask which tier contains customer-specific prices, and calculate from that tier rather than from the entry tier.
Ask for a written answer on whether Business Central on-premises can be supported. The vendor's experience with local point-of-sale systems makes the question reasonable to ask, but we have found no documentation for it.
Finally, ask to see the same item in the shop, in the point of sale and in Business Central at the same time. That is the demonstration showing whether the promise of one data foundation holds in practice, and it is quick to carry out.