Your customer placed an order through your web store at 11 PM. By morning, it needs to be in your ERP, taxed correctly, and ready to pick. If those three systems are not talking to each other, someone on your team is spending their morning making it happen manually. That is not a workflow problem. That is a systems problem.

Three Systems. One Operation.

Modern distribution runs on more than an ERP. You have an e-commerce channel where customers place orders. You have a tax and compliance layer that has to keep up with multi-state rules, exempt customers, and shifting rates. And you have the ERP at the center - the place where everything has to land, reconcile, and make sense.

The question is not whether you need all three. You do. The question is whether they are connected tightly enough to actually run as one operation, or whether your team is bridging the gaps manually every day.

In our on-demand workshop, Connecting the Dots in Distribution, we ran a live demo with all three working together: Commerce Build for e-commerce, Avalara for tax compliance, and Dynamics 365 Business Central as the system of record holding it all together. Here is what the architecture looks like in practice.

Commerce Build: Where Orders Start

Commerce Build runs e-commerce on top of Business Central - not alongside it. That distinction matters more than it sounds. Most mainstream e-commerce platforms require you to maintain a separate product catalog, sync pricing manually, and build connectors that need ongoing maintenance. Commerce Build reads directly from Business Central, so the price your customer sees online is the price Business Central has on file for that customer. No separate catalog. No sync job to babysit.

When a customer places an order through the web store, it arrives in Business Central as a sales order - with customer-specific pricing already applied and inventory availability confirmed in real time. Companies lose an estimated 5-15% of annual revenue to inefficiencies from disconnected systems.¹ The integration removes that gap at exactly the point where orders are created.

Business Central: Where Everything Lands

Dynamics 365 Business Central is the operational hub. Every order, regardless of channel, lands here. Whether it came from Commerce Build, your inside sales team, or an EDI connection, it becomes a sales order with the same customer data, the same pricing logic, and the same inventory picture. That single source of truth is what makes the rest of the stack work.

Business Central uses live flow fields - real-time calculations that pull current stock, open orders, pending transfers, and incoming purchases into a single availability number. When a customer calls to ask if you can ship 50 cases by Thursday, you are not guessing. Ninety-two percent of wholesale distributors run ERP software today,² but not all of them have real-time visibility in the same system processing their orders. That gap is where errors happen and where customer experience breaks down.

Pricing complexity is handled here too. Customer-specific price groups, multiple units of measure, and enough flexibility to sell coffee beans by the bag retail and by the case wholesale - with costing that stays accurate either way.

Avalara: Where Tax Gets Handled

Tax calculation is the third leg of this stack, and the one most distributors underestimate until they have a problem. Multi-state shipping, exempt customers, resale certificates, product-level tax codes - the complexity compounds with every new state you enter and every new customer type you serve.

Avalara connects directly to Business Central. When an order comes in - whether from Commerce Build or entered manually - Avalara calculates tax in real time based on the ship-to address, the product classification, and the customer's exemption status. Your team never leaves Business Central to do it. The certificate is already on file. The jurisdiction mapping is already done. The rate is current, even when state rules change.

Enterprises that have adopted integrated order management solutions report 30% improvement in order accuracy and 25% reduction in delivery lead times.³ When tax is calculated correctly the first time, your finance team is not issuing credit memos or chasing corrections later.

What It Looks Like When It All Works

The full cycle in the workshop ran like this: a customer placed an order in the Commerce Build web store. That order landed in Business Central as a sales order, with customer-specific pricing applied and inventory availability confirmed. Avalara calculated tax on the transaction before the invoice posted - accounting for the customer's exempt status and the ship-to jurisdiction without anyone manually looking anything up.

No handoffs between systems. No reconciliation at the end of the day. Finance saw a clean, accurate invoice before it went out. That is what the connected workflow actually produces.

Right-Sized for Where You Are

One concern we hear from mid-market distributors is that building this kind of stack sounds expensive and complex. Business Central is designed to be the right-size answer - it handles core distribution workflows out of the box and grows with you without requiring a two-year implementation or a seven-figure budget. You are not buying more system than your organization is ready to adopt.

Western Computer has been implementing Microsoft Dynamics for nearly four decades, with more than 1,700 ERP and CRM implementations. The work that goes well is the work where the business team owns the outcome and can run the system independently - not where they are dependent on outside help to keep the lights on.

The full demo - Commerce Build to Business Central to Avalara, running end to end on a live distribution scenario - is in our on-demand workshop, Connecting the Dots in Distribution. Watch it to see the whole workflow in motion and decide if this is the architecture you want to build toward.

CITATIONS

1. "Disconnected Systems Are Costing Distributors Millions: Why Integration Is No Longer Optional." MSDynamicsWorld.com. Companies lose an estimated 5-15% of annual revenue due to poor system connectivity. https://msdynamicsworld.com/blog-post/disconnected-systems-are-costing-distributors-millions-why-integration-no-longer-optional
2. "20 ERP Stats for Wholesale Distribution in 2025." Anchor Group, 2025. 92% of wholesale distribution firms use ERP software. https://www.anchorgroup.tech/blog/wholesale-distribution-erp-statistics
3. "MultiChannel Order Management Market Is Expected To Reach A Revenue Of USD 10.6 Bn By 2033." GlobeNewswire / Dimension Market Research, January 2025. Enterprises adopting integrated order management solutions report 30% improvement in order accuracy and 25% reduction in delivery lead times. https://www.globenewswire.com/news-release/2025/01/29/3017202/