Applications
Tools for your staff, built on your ERP data
The platform behind your e‑commerce
The core platform keeps your ERP data mirrored and controls who has access to what across Chainbox's products.
More systems, more logins
A modern e-commerce solution isn't one system. There's a webshop, a PIM, tools for your sales reps and the integration with your ERP, and in a MACH architecture each system usually has its own users. When someone leaves, their access has to be closed in lots of places, and it's easy to miss one. At the same time, NIS2 and your own customers expect you to be able to document who has access to your data.
Data and access
The data mirror
Your ERP has to look after the rest of the business without being weighed down by webshop traffic.
That's why the webshop, PIM and Sales Insight work from a data mirror that's continuously updated with ERP data. The mirror is split up, so the shared systems and the webshop are isolated and can't interfere with each other.
Two types of users
A customer should see their own prices and orders and nothing else, while your staff need to work across everything. So they log in in different places. Sales reps, editors, customer service and administrators log in via chainbox.io with a single login and two-factor authentication, which gives them access to the parts of the solution your administrator has given them access to.
Your customers log in through the login form on the webshop and can only buy on behalf of their own customer account. Their logins are managed in Webshop Management by your customer service team.
Administration and permissions
People take on new tasks, change departments and leave, and that's usually when old access gets left behind. Your administrator manages it in the administration area, where users are created and given access to apps, both the shared apps and the webshop. Users can be placed in departments and given roles, which the individual apps can use to control access in more detail where the app supports it.
When someone leaves, the administrator closes their access in one place, and it's closed in every app. The administrator can also make two-factor authentication mandatory for all users, so it isn't up to each person. The administration area also gives you an overview of your subscriptions, the installations and databases we run for you, and the details we have on file for billing, contacts and data controller.
Audit log
When someone asks who had access or who changed a permission, you should be able to answer without asking us. The audit log records logins, failed logins, when a user opens an app, and changes to users and permissions. You can filter it by user, action and time period and use it to document who had access to what, for example for your auditor or your customers. Only your administrator can see the log.
FAQ
Because the requirements have gone up. If you're covered by NIS2, or your customers are, you need to be able to show who has access to your systems and data, and that access is protected by more than a password. That's why we bring access together in one place with two-factor authentication and an audit log, so it's easy to close someone's access and easy to document it afterwards.
Security is also about where data is stored. Customer data often contains personal data, and GDPR sets requirements for how it's processed. All data at Chainbox is hosted in the EU.
Let's say your administrator creates a new customer service employee in the administration area and gives her access to Webshop Management and a sales rep login for the webshop, so she can serve all customers.
When she logs in at chainbox.io, she sees two icons, one for each app. If she clicks Webshop Management, she's logged in and can manage customers' logins. Under her initials she has a menu with the same two apps, so she can jump straight into the webshop, where she's logged in as a sales rep and can order on behalf of customers.
If she leaves, the administrator closes her access in one place, and she no longer has access to either of them.
There's a delay. Changes to products and customers usually come across quickly, while stock and prices are updated in scheduled runs, and in return the ERP isn't weighed down by webshop traffic. If you need a lookup directly in the ERP at checkout, for example remaining stock or credit limit, the webshop can be customised for that if the ERP supports it.
The data mirror holds the ERP data the solution uses, for example products, stock, customers, price lists, discounts, orders and invoices. How it's updated depends on the ERP: via API, webhooks or replication from the database, supplemented with scheduled runs. The ERP is still the master.
How often data is updated, how the order gets back to the ERP, and how we work with your ERP partner is described on the page about your ERP.