Adempiere ERP/CRM Web Shop in Drupal

We are currently implementing Adempiere ERP/CRM with an implementation partner in Australia.

In our implementation project, our marketing department want to have a Webstore integrated in with general website content (e.g. latest news with various shopping artifacts (specials, checkout links, buy this) spread around the website. Further down the track marketing may wish to "customise" the way the web site works for particular customer profiles (both for Adempiere sales, and for Web2.0 collaboration type applications).

We are looking at having some development work done around this to allow Adempiere's webstore integrated into a Web Content Management System (CMS) to achieve this - at this stage the CMS has not been chosen, but we need to do so shortly.

My thoughts around this are not to implement any of the existing Drupal shopping carts but to look to create nodes in Drupal that link back to the ERP/CRM system. The reason being that we want to drive the system behaviour through the very configurable Active Directory of Adempiere and keep a single data-entry interface for our end-users. This also means that we can still manage people who phone-in to place an order rather than use the web. We would use the PostgreSQL database for both Adempiere & Drupal.

We would need to link Drupal logins on the website Adempiere, even being able to look at tracking people's activity before they login (i.e. cookies where they are allowed) and then create records in the Adempiere system to recognise when people travelled the website. We want people to be able to browse the website and then freely shop whilst they go. When shopping, pricing may change once they login and we want to be able to draw people's attention to complementary/alternative products in their area of interest as well as appropriate specials.

Obviously we would need to engage the correct level of expertise to help make it happen and then we would like to share this back with both the Adempiere & Drupal communities.

I would be interested in other's thoughts about this idea, and any likely difficult areas, including gotchas.