API development and integration for UK businesses tired of retyping data

An API is how one piece of software asks another for information or tells it to do something. Integration is the job of wiring those conversations together so a customer’s details are typed once and turn up everywhere they are needed: the shop, the accounts, the CRM, the courier, the mailing list.

If someone in your business spends the first hour of every day copying orders from one screen into another, that hour is the business case. At £13 an hour plus on-costs, an hour a day is roughly £4,000 a year in wages before you count the mistakes, the refunds sent to the wrong customer and the VAT returns that don’t reconcile. Most of the integrations we build cost less than one year of that.

What we connect most often

• Website and WooCommerce orders into Xero, QuickBooks or Sage, with customers, VAT rates and payments matched so the bookkeeper isn’t fixing them on a Friday.
• Enquiry, quote and booking forms into a CRM, helpdesk or mailing list, with the lead source recorded.
• Stripe, GoCardless and PayPal payments tied to bookings, invoices and memberships, including refunds and failed payments.
• Stock and prices kept in step between a shop, a warehouse or ERP system and marketplaces.
• Courier label printing, tracking numbers and delivery emails.
• One login shared between a website, a mobile app and a customer portal.
• Reporting feeds that pull numbers from four systems into one dashboard someone actually looks at.

For LAV we connected a redesigned website to the organisation’s ERP, so the two no longer had to be kept in step by hand. That kind of job is typical: unglamorous, invisible when it works, and the part of a project people thank you for six months later.

Building your own API

Sometimes the job is the other way round. You need an API of your own because you are launching a mobile app, because a trade customer in Leeds wants their purchasing system to place orders automatically, or because a partner in Glasgow wants live availability on their site. We build REST APIs in Laravel or Node.js, and we are fairly strict about how:

• versioned endpoints, so a change for one partner never breaks the app already on 2,000 phones;
• token authentication with per-client permissions, so a reseller sees their own orders and nothing else;
• rate limits and input validation, because someone will eventually send you 50,000 requests in a minute by accident;
• webhooks, so partner systems hear about a change straight away instead of polling every five seconds;
• written documentation with example requests and responses, so their developer doesn’t need to ring yours.

How a project runs

Map the data before writing code

We list what has to move, between which systems, how often, and which system owns the true version of each record. Nearly every integration problem we have been asked to rescue comes down to two systems both believing they are in charge of the same customer. Deciding the owner of each field up front avoids weeks of mysterious overwrites.

Test the other side with real accounts

Vendor documentation and vendor reality are often different things. Before we quote, we get sandbox or test access and try the calls we will need. Some platforms have excellent APIs. Some cap you at a few hundred requests an hour, charge extra for API access on cheaper plans, or simply don’t expose the field you need. You hear about that before you commit, not after.

Build for the bad day

Connections drop, tokens expire and third-party services have outages, usually on Black Friday. We use queues and retries so records wait and go through when the service recovers. Anything that still fails is logged and flagged to a named person by email or Slack. Silent failure is the worst outcome, because you find out from a customer.

Watch the first month

Real data is stranger than test data: addresses with no postcode, partial refunds, orders split across two shipments, a customer whose surname is a single letter. We monitor the integration through its first weeks of live traffic and handle the edge cases as they appear. You also get a one-page map of what talks to what, so a future developer isn’t guessing.

Off-the-shelf connectors or custom code?

Zapier, Make and the marketplace plug-ins are fine for low volumes and simple flows, and we will tell you if one will do the job. They get expensive and fragile when volumes rise or the logic has more than a couple of conditions.

Our honest default: start with a connector if it fits, and move to custom code when you find yourself building workarounds for the connector.

Payments

Stripe is our default for UK card payments, deposits and subscriptions, GoCardless for Direct Debit, PayPal where customers expect to see it. We use Stripe’s hosted payment elements and webhooks, so card numbers never touch your server. That keeps your PCI DSS paperwork at the lightest self-assessment level rather than turning you into a company that stores cards. The fiddly part is never taking the payment; it is handling the refunds, disputes and failed renewals correctly, and that is where most of our hours go.

What it costs

Integration work is booked as custom web development hours at £60 an hour excluding VAT, and the hours never expire.

The prices include our volume discounts: 15 hours is £900 less 10 %, so £810, or £972 including VAT. Some platforms charge for API access or premium plans, and we flag those costs before you start. If the real problem is that you are running three systems that should be one, a custom CRM may be the better spend.

Who you will be working with

We are a small team based in London, and we take on integration work for businesses anywhere in the UK, from Cardiff to Aberdeen. Most integration projects run perfectly well remotely over screen-share. Where warehouse, till or ERP systems are involved and you are within reach of London, we like to come and watch the data being used, because that is usually when someone mentions the step that isn’t in the brief.

Tell us what you want connected

Send us a list of the systems you use and where your team retypes data. We will check what each one allows and come back with a fixed estimate or a block of hours. Contact us, or read our comparison of Stripe, PayPal and GoCardless if payments are part of the picture.