The way companies and customers do business has been revolutionized by ecommerce. Customers from around the world can connect with your business and make a purchase with just a couple of clicks.
Those online orders, however, will potentially put a burden on your company without an integrated ecommerce solution. It can become expensive and unmanageable to manually pass orders from your online store into your back-end accounting system.
For brands, utilizing an integrated ecommerce marketing platform that increases sales and scales rapidly is the greatest accelerator to success.
Your brand could be stuck relying on different marketing technologies without a consolidated platform, resulting in siloed data, hard time management, and missed opportunities for interaction.
A disconnected marketing tech stack leads to disconnected consumer interactions, making lifetime value more difficult to expand.
Your brand will streamline operations with an integrated platform and concentrate on what matters most: delivering unified and high-converting customer experiences.
What is ecommerce integration?
The world of is big. A whole host of considerations and challenges come with such scale and complexity. The dynamics of ecommerce itself is one of those.
Setting up an efficient online store will mean setting up a large range of products, all of which need to function in accordance with each other to meet the needs of a modern customer while shopping.
This means, from a business point of view, juggling behind the scenes a seemingly infinite array of applications, platforms, and systems to fulfill such demands. It’s not always easy.
That’s where the integration of ecommerce comes in. Integration could be thought of as an extremely well-built road network that links each and every one of your systems.
The online store and other online sales platforms are basically connected to the back-end systems (such as an ERP platform, warehouse management system, finance software, etc.).
This helps everything communicate seamlessly and bi-directionally, ensuring that data and information can move freely and automatically and be used.
This eliminates the need to separately enter data manually into various systems, making back-end business processes much more successful as well as significantly reducing the potential for errors and problems.
Ecommerce API integration issues
Ecommerce stores offer feature-rich platforms for many businesses that provide mobile, scalable solutions designed to better leverage online sales channels.
Following their deployment, most businesses frequently experience a substantial increase in traffic, conversion rate, and annual revenue rise. While this is fantastic news for the business, it can also cause new difficulties.
As every organization would know, coping with administrative tasks simply detracts from the intended target. .
Therefore, ecommerce processes and workflow must be continuously monitored and reviewed, since these will help raise revenue streams and working capital if upgraded.
The main cause of this is repetitive data processing between systems – the rekeying of data to and from an ecommerce platform to other systems and apps. It is simply poor management of time and a waste of money.
A sudden rise in demand can quickly overwhelm employees and stretch resources, leading to errors and a bad customer experience, if the online store is not completely integrated with existing systems and the admin is reliant on manual processes.
When client orders enter back-office operations and trigger out-of-stocks, backlogs, and duplicate entries, problems will arise.
Production of orders can also be impacted, resulting in cash flow and turnover disruptions, and as a result, customer relationships can suffer.
The benefits of integrating ecommerce
1. Improved after-sales service
With the opportunity to have everything in one conveniently accessible system, it is substantially easier to manage any concerns that might occur before a customer’s purchase.
This is where an integrated CRM becomes incredibly useful, as critical aspects of these platforms are instances such as RMA requests and other after-sales services.
The decreased uncertainty from getting all in one place would also undoubtedly have a positive impact on your consumer experience, which implies happier and more satisfied customers all across.
2. Synchronize Customer Records and Inventory
When an order is placed online, inventory is automatically redirected and decremented in the back-office accounting or inventory system. The same applies to customer data.
3. Intuitive, streamlined, and automated system management
Automation is one of the key elements of ecommerce integration. Once ecommerce processes are automated, a positive impact is evident across a variety of parameters in the business.
As each and every process becomes simplified and decreases the need for high human intervention, internal efficiency can also see a substantial boost.
Integration, for instance, offers seamless compatibility between payment gateways, systems for shipping and logistics, and omnichannel sales feed.
This is extremely helpful not just for customers who are able to see and interact exactly as they need with your company, but also for back-office employees who frequently access accounting or inventory systems.
4. Efficient omnichannel sales management
Since everything is optimized and designed to function in harmony with each other in an integrated ecommerce platform, it is easy to handle multiple channels.
An omnichannel business can benefit from the same automated system much like a single channel sales process, which means that each and every bit of data and information is correct across the board without having to fiddle with duplicate data.
5. Automation Cost Savings
Integrating ERP with your ecommerce store ensures that sales orders transition smoothly in minutes from your website to your warehouse.
With reduced labor and maintenance costs, reducing the time and logistical burden of manual data transfer goes straight to your bottom line.
6. Fewer Errors
It’s easy to lose focus and transpose numbers, enter the wrong amount, enter the wrong shipping address, or even lose track of a stack of orders entirely while employees are manually re-keying web orders into the system.
You’ll minimize manual data entry and reduce the number of data entry errors with integrated ecommerce. It’s the same quick, reliable, consistent, and error-free process every single time, regardless of whether you process 1 or 1,000 orders.
Goals of an Integrated System
The aim of an integrated solution is to maximize the opportunity for your sales and reduce your operational costs. By reusing product data in many different operations, a well-designed solution would allow you to more effectively incorporate new products.
In your online, call center or physical operations, you should have easy access to all customer history and data.
This would have a positive effect on your top line by enabling you to reference previous sales and probably up-sell from an automated system.
You’ll introduce operational efficiencies by integrating data systems. For example, you can minimize costs and have real-time access to your finances if order management is directly connected to accounting and you do not need to manually post user or summary order information.
If you support multichannel operations, getting product data centralized would allow you to use it in streams, on your website, in your call center, and in your physical stores.
Finally, it can create a more effective workflow by providing higher levels of integration. Ideally, data can be unified and for many allocation and back-office operations, you should implement automation.
Source: Integrated eCommerce
