Wicks Aircraft

Wicks Aircraft provides aircraft parts and supplies for both professional aircraft builders and aviation enthusiasts. Their catalog covers everything from raw materials like aluminum and steel to hardware, tools, and specialized items like streamline tubing, serving a customer base that depends on accurate parts and pricing information.

Wicks Aircraft needed a modern e-commerce platform for their customers, but their existing accounting system, the system of record for inventory and pricing, was a legacy system never built to talk to a modern website. Two systems that couldn't natively communicate meant a real risk of customers seeing outdated inventory counts or incorrect pricing, and orders placed on the website having no automatic way to reach the accounting system that actually managed fulfillment and billing.

Rather than replacing the legacy accounting system outright, which would have meant disrupting a system Wicks already depended on, we built a custom middleware layer to connect it to their new e-commerce platform. This let Wicks modernize the customer-facing side of their business while keeping their existing accounting infrastructure intact and authoritative.

Inventory and pricing sync

The middleware continuously polls the legacy accounting database for updated inventory and pricing, storing the results in a dedicated middleware database built specifically for rapid retrieval by the website. Customers browsing the site see current product availability and accurate pricing pulled from the source of truth, without the website ever needing to query the legacy system directly.

Order integration

When a customer places an order on the modern website, the middleware receives and processes it, updates the accounting database, and transforms the order data into the exact format the legacy accounting software requires. That translation step is what makes two otherwise incompatible systems work together seamlessly, letting orders flow from website to accounting without manual re-entry.

Together, these two pieces gave Wicks real-time product availability, accurate pricing, and automated order handling between systems that were never designed to talk to each other.

Wicks Aircraft now runs a modern e-commerce storefront backed by inventory and pricing data that stays in sync with their accounting system automatically, instead of manual updates or the risk of a customer ordering something no longer in stock. Orders placed online flow through to the accounting system without staff needing to manually re-enter order details, reducing a step that previously created both extra work and room for error. The middleware approach also meant Wicks didn't have to abandon or rebuild their existing accounting infrastructure to get a modern storefront, keeping the transition lower-risk for a business that depends on that system daily.

Wicks Aircraft's project is a good example of modernizing the customer experience without having to rip out the legacy systems a business already depends on. If your business needs a modern website or application that can talk to an existing accounting, inventory, or legacy system, explore: