Ecommerce integrations: What is it & benefits and top best critical ecommerce integrations for online business
E-Commerce Integrations are becoming popular when eCommerce has grown into a booming industry after global lockdowns amid a year-long pandemic. The growth of the online market is stronger and stronger. People want their businesses to grow. However, running a business is never a straight line, it’s a fast race over an obstacle course with financial, logistical, and technical challenges. Therefore, it’s more important than ever to keep your online store as streamlined and simple as possible.
This post aims to provide answers about what eCommerce integration is and what you should know about it.
What are eCommerce Integrations?
E-commerce integrations are data transfers between an eCommerce platform and five key components: accounting, inventory, sales, CRM, and marketing. Ecommerce integration saves a lot of time for us. In short, you only need to enter your data once, and it is transmitted end-to-end and stored, making it accessible to everyone for each individual customer account. The answer to the question of what is eCommerce integration also shows its importance in operational business management
This allows brands to keep up with thousands of customers converting simultaneously across multiple channels, and track the progress of product transfers regardless of the channel used to complete the transaction.
If you are looking for eCommerce services for your business, get in touch with us. Onext Digital is a software company with full services, we also deliver eCommerce services for clients over the world for many years. Let’s learn more and we’ll help you get a comprehensive eCommerce strategy.
What are the Benefits of eCommerce Integrations?
Ecommerce integrations should increase your production and simultaneously can indirectly support your growth and development. When you integrate your website with other online sales channels or backend systems, you can take some advantages following:
- Eliminate manual and duplicate entries
- Increase the speed of data exchange between multiple systems
- Provides access to thousands of retailers who have built their businesses on it.
- Synchronize inventory across all sales channels
- Easily add sales channels
- Respond proactively to increasing sales
- Perform updates quickly and efficiently with no latency between systems
- Streamline business processes and eliminate redundant steps
- free up valuable resources.
- Allow your solution that works with retailers to capture and manage all store data. This data includes orders, customers, products, shipments, shopping carts, categories, and taxes.
- Help you apply new features and offer them to your customers to increase profits.
The top best critical eCommerce integrations for online business
We’ve been working with over 1,000 merchants and businesses to discover what kinds of eCommerce platforms, software, and integrations they use to power their online stores. Here are the top best critical eCommerce integrations for online businesses should consider.
1. Website Builder- eCommerce integrations
Any e-commerce website depends on the system on which it is built. The foundation of most integrations will be the platform you use to run your online store. A website builder (Wix, Squarespace, Weebly, etc.) offers a variety of tools to help him create a website suitable for his products and customers.
Some website builders (Shopify, WooCommerce, BigCommerce, etc.) are also eCommerce platforms that specialize in selling online. Many also offer e-commerce features such as member portals, online databases, social sharing options, and mobile-friendly themes. Every website builder wants to integrate with other important applications knowing that they are not only building and running a business but also facilitating it and synchronizing that data with other systems. must be provided.
2. Shipping and fulfillment software
As you run your e-commerce business, shipping can play an important role in how quickly your wealth grows and shrinks. For example, if you’re selling jewelry that costs thousands of dollars per piece, you can’t risk shipping or delivery issues due to incorrect addresses or shipping delays. It’s up to you to deliver your customer’s purchases quickly, reliably, and safely.
Thanks to expedited shipping programs like Amazon Prime, shoppers have come to expect fast, free, or discounted shipping. Shoppers also don’t like being surprised by unexpected shipping charges during their checkout process. This is one of the main reasons why many online stores have high cart abandonment rates. Shipping and fulfillment software integrations can automate and minimize tedious tasks associated with shipping, such as B. Compare shipping rates from different providers, print labels and packing slips, and track shipments. Shipping software integration can reduce the risk of manual errors and offer your customers the best shipping options.
3. Email marketing solution- eCommerce integrations
Perhaps you are one of the 4 billion people in the world who use email. The email has long been the cornerstone of most inbound and outbound sales and marketing efforts. Many businesses use email addresses to uniquely identify their customers. Email is the preferred communication channel for order confirmations, promotional and discount codes, and adding or changing business. This is the most popular form of marketing automation for B2B and B2C e-commerce businesses.
Providing an email integration to your website allows us to collect the email addresses of visitors who are currently browsing so that we can contact them and encourage them to become customers. By integrating with your email marketing solution, you can also target specific customer segments based on their behavior. By integrating these programs with e-commerce platforms such as WooCommerce, Magento, Shopify, and BigCommerce, merchants can centrally manage and track their customer data in one place.
4. SMS marketing solution
One of the best ways to build an online business is to reach customers through text marketing. A reason why SMS marketing is growing is that more and more customers are buying directly from their mobile phones. Mobile phones now account for over 70% of all e-commerce traffic and more than half of all online sales are made through mobile devices.
Shoppers want to be able to search, browse, sign up for text messages, receive promotional codes via SMS, add items to their cart, and complete purchases all within minutes on their mobile phones. increase. For shoppers who increasingly value speed and convenience in a market that is overwhelmingly competitive for eye-catchers, e-commerce SMS marketing can help capture and retain their attention. Also, text message open rates (98,5%) are on average higher than email messages (25%), so it’s important to integrate your email marketing efforts with text marketing. This way, you can meet your customers wherever they are, track which messages and campaigns resonate the most, and use that customer data to improve your marketing ROI.
5. Payment gateway– eCommerce integrations
Web-based payment systems are the foundation of online sales. As the final step in the checkout process, payment gateways securely and quickly validate the credit card and banking information exchanged between you and your customer. Today, customers expect multiple payment options on your websites, such as Visa and Mastercard, or PayPal and Klarna.
Dealers also have options. You can integrate a redirect payment processor where the customer is redirected to the payment processor’s website to enter credit card payments and then sent back to the store once the payment is complete. Alternatively, you can integrate an on-premises payment gateway so that your customers stay on your server to enter their payment information. This option gives the merchant more control over the payment experience, but it requires its own POS system.
6. Social media management tool
If you want to be where your customers are, that probably means using social media. At least two-thirds of Americans spend time on social media platforms every day, perfect for businesses to listen to, engage with, influence purchasing decisions, and solve problems. It has become a place.
Integrating social media management software with other marketing and eCommerce software is an easy way to automate communications, save time, and deliver a consistent message about your brand. If you have more volume, it might be worth hiring an eCommerce agency to support your needs. You can also integrate engagement data from your social media tools into your analytics dashboards to see how social media You can also see how much and what kind of traffic you’re sending to your store. Social media also acts as a proxy for customer support. Responding to customer questions and comments on Twitter is often faster and easier than using email or chatbots.
7. Inventory management
To run your business efficiently, you need to track your orders and manage your inventory in one place. This gives you and your customers real-time visibility into inventory levels. You want to know when to reorder your inventory and when to let your customers know when the items they want are back in stock. Integration with your inventory management system gives you real-time insight into your products and allows you to sync data between stores or systems as needed.
Integrate your software to manage your inventory so you can track what’s sold, know when to restock, and identify your most popular products. Inventory management integration also helps prevent lost sales opportunities and establish a healthy balance between supply and demand.
8. CRM management– eCommerce integrations
Customer relationship management (CRM) systems are designed to help you better understand your buyers based on customer data, so you can increase the value of your relationships. A CRM system helps you keep track of your customer’s personal information and interactions. This data helps you target customers based on their past behavior, identify trends, and build customer loyalty.
A CRM system integrated with marketing tools, ordering systems, and analytics applications provides a complete picture of customer demographics, shopping behavior, and average order value (AOV). By using CRM tools to better understand your customers, you can use it to tailor your offers, increase sales, and build loyalty.
9. Customer support software
Shoppers will come back to your store if you satisfy them. So you can be sure that your customers are met somewhere where they can raise their questions, concerns, or complaints with a quick and informed response. Essential. The best way to do this is to integrate different approaches to customer support (live chat, helpdesk, etc.) into your eCommerce platform. This way, you have a single point of record for all customer interactions and can consistently deliver a high level of service to your customers.
A live chat or chatbot integration is a cost-effective way to expand your customer support. By automating common questions and answers, you can serve many customers at the same time. And by integrating with helpdesk systems like Zendesk, you can document customer interactions through tickets and associate those tickets with customer accounts.
10. Accounting solution
Accounting software can speed up bookkeeping by automating key processes. Automation also helps reduce the potential for human error when consolidating hundreds or thousands of individual transactions.
Reporting and ease of use are key features of any eCommerce accounting solution. You want instant, real-time visibility into your finances with dashboards tailored to your business needs. Consolidation is also essential when integrating brick-and-mortar finance or multiple online stores online to provide a single source of truth.
Conclusion
E-commerce Integrations are one of the important things when you use an eCommerce platform, which you should consider. If you choose the right integrations, you can create a cohesive customer experience across every touchpoint you have with your shoppers.
Are you looking for ways to make your business grow fast by using eCommerce services? Let ONEXT DIGITAL help you. Contact us to get more information or learn more about eCommerce services here.
