eCommerce Integration

what, where and how?

This is at this stage of the game where any Company truly want to optimize sales and keep all systems running in sync to serve customers 24/7, 365 days a year to reach maximum order fulfillment potential.

A web store (eCommerce Store) can operate without connections to your ERP/Accounting or Financial Systems. Why would we want to integrate eCommerce into our ERP/Accounting system?

The need for an integrated ERP and eCommerce system is usually overlooked because of cost or the business disruption caused by having to change existing systems. Each aspect of your business is affected by a customer’s shopping experience — which means fulfillment processes need to be examined before deciding how to proceed.

Integration enables items, inventory, orders, customers and other pertinent sales data to pass between independent/disparate systems to communicate with each other. The uncertainty for most Companies is the cost of manually managing and administrating sales data. It also often costs companies more than they think. Without existing retail business systems sharing data, retailers could see a loss in sales, delivery delays, poor customer satisfaction — and most important — reduced cash flow.

Some eCommerce and ERP integrations allow necessary data to be automatically exchanged in both directions. For example, an order created in the online store is immediately pushed to the ERP/Accounting system used to fulfill the order. Not only does this save time, but it eliminates human error and gets product, inventory, item, billing and sales information into a shared information system.

In order to be successful online and keep up with increased demand; your eCommerce strategy should include integration to ERP, accounting and inventory software (or other systems you use in your multi-channel environment, like POS). Having this integration will ensure that products shown on the web store are actually in stock.

Additionally, your business will become more flexible. Integrating your web store with ERP will enable you to see all new orders and customers in your business system. Products and pricing can be managed from one place — which makes the whole process much simpler. Integration provides a much more accurate exchange of data that scales as you grow.

eCommerce is expected to reach $250 billion by 2014 according to Forrester Research US. Are you ready to handle this demand?