Integrating e-commerce into your business website is a crucial step to make sure you have a well-oiled business, with all your accounting at the same place. The integration of an e-commerce platform helps make your business more efficient as it does so much. Let’s see how this integration can help scale your business to new heights.
What is e-commerce integration?
We can define e-commerce integration to be the coordination between your business’ e-commerce and your backend accounting and inventory system (ERP). This enables your data to flow into two systems rather than just one, meaning, you don’t have to input your data twice.
ERP is the process that allows big companies to integrate their top features and businesses into one. It will enable you to combine all the necessary processes into a single system to allow smooth and functional operation, overall.
Why is e-commerce integration important?
E-commerce integration can help save a lot of time for e-commerce retailers by giving them a platform where they can keep track of the records of the movement of the products from the warehouse till it reaches the customers.
It also helps you track down the activities of users on multiple channels and improve your logistics a lot. Furthermore, it helps you improve and maintain the security of the accounting and customer care, which now you can do easily.
What are the advantages of e-commerce integration?
Significant improvement in functionality
Once you integrate your e-commerce portal with your main website, it becomes a lot more functional for both parties. It gets easier for the people working on the company’s end to look into the features and transactions with ease.
Similarly, your customers can also look into the details of the order, like the status of shipment and delivery, information regarding the available inventory, and more.
It is a massive plus as your customers themselves can view the information that helps them.
Reduction of cost
As mentioned, your customers can aid themselves now to get a sufficient amount of information that helps them. Therefore, it reduces the cost of operations a lot.
Furthermore, one of the most significant cost reductions come in the form of inventory cost. Since an ERP gives all the web sales information from time to time, it allows you to forecast and plan the inventory accordingly.
Saved time and increased productivity
A lot of the redundant efforts can now be eliminated. You no longer have to add data manually, every time. You have to do it just once, and the software will manage it for the rest of the process.
The ERP integrates all the web sales into the system and thereby reduces the time involved in the order fulfilment cycle.
Improved security on accounting
Post the e-commerce integration, your application not only gives its usual financial reports on sales, but starts producing balance sheets, P/L statement, trial balance, cash flow, and so on. It improves transparency and security across the organisation, as everything is software-generated.
Decreased data redundancy and errors
E-commerce integration helps in reporting details like customer data, web orders, payment methods and shipments. Furthermore, you can upload the details of the inventory and item in particular from the ERP to the e-commerce platform, thus eliminating the need of adding the same data once again.
With reduced human involvement in the process, the possibility of human errors reduces considerably. Moreover, human resources working on the projects do not have to perform repetitive functions, as the software manages those, and in turn, improves productivity and efficiency.
Better customer care
In any business, customer satisfaction is the biggest criterion that a company needs to fulfil, every single day. It becomes even more critical in an e-commerce platform, as the majority of the business depends on customer satisfaction.
With ERP, your customer has more transparency of the operations like tracking, inventory, and so on. What makes this an essential part of customer satisfaction is that your customer now knows what happens behind the scenes. This gives them a more involved feel and in turn, offers credibility to your company.
Better control of your business
With the integration, the system gives you better control of your business, which is exactly what any business owner would want. It integrates the manufacturing, inventory, orders, financials, CRM, and other such functionalities into one big system and thus allows you to operate from one location.
It not only improves the communications between the internal systems but also helps you improve your revenue. Since the proper integration of the e-commerce website into your main website makes it a two-way process, you need to add data into the system just once.
This automatically results in saving you a lot of time and also helps in the management of human resource.
Conclusion
With such terrific advantages of the e-commerce integration for your business website, it helps your business boom to a new level. It allows you to gain more control over your business and build a better rapport with the customers. Since the ERP software helps you improve almost every parameter of your business, integrating your business would be the best move forward for your company.
