Ecommerce Integration

We live in a connected, small world where reaching the other end of the world is just a click away. This interconnected world also means that for businesses, the world could be a marketplace. Products and services can reach the farthest corners of the world giving new opportunities for an exponential business growth.

However, unlike a local store, your customers cannot swipe a card or pay cash to the cashier. So the challenge of receiving payments, giving receipts and other aspects of ecommerce make it necessary for websites to be able to generate invoices, receive payments and give receipts without human intervention. This is where ecommerce integration comes in.

What is Ecommerce Integration?

Ecommerce integration is about integrating a payment gateway, shopping cart and other elements of ecommerce into a website to facilitate buying and selling of products and services online. Technically speaking, the two way communication between the visitor through the website interface that a visitor sees and the databases and back-end systems that allow online ecommerce. It is the system that lets the website know what the customer wants, what color, how much, any other specifications, shipping details, and much more. Ecommerce integration gets an entire process rolling that includes inventories, accounting and billing, customer history and relationship management, logistics, cancellations, refunds, returns, feedback and much more.

Importance of Ecommerce Integration Success in ecommerce is much more than merely integrating a shopping cart and payment gateway on the website. These two would give ecommerce capability to your website. But ecommerce is also about the experience of doing business with a website. This is where back-end ecommerce integration can make a huge difference by eliminating inefficiencies and building an integrated system that ensures customer delight.

For instance, how do you track a customer’s past purchase history and make recommendations? A simple thing like knowing that a customer purchases a certain brand and quantity of coffee in the first week of every month — and then suggesting it while the customer returns to the site in the first week of the month can go a long way in delighting the customer. Or suggesting a gift purchase a week before an anniversary or sending a discount gift cart just ahead of an important date can mean maximizing business in addition to building customer loyalty. These are just two examples of customer experience. Like this, there can be thousands of interactions that well designed ecommerce integration can facilitate.

Good Ecommerce Integration A well integrated ecommerce solution should achieve all of the below and much more:

• Maximize revenue potential by identifying and triggering ecommerce opportunities
• Reduction of operating costs
• Simplicity of adding new products and services
• Facility of creating combo offers by combining products
• Access and meaningful analysis of customer history, and sharing of information through all customer touch-points, even beyond your website be it your call center or physical store
• Seamless integration with accounting for all aspects of business finances
• Efficiency in logistics management
• Providing a customized experience that aligns with a customer’s tastes
• Meaningful, scalable and customizable data storage — be it customer data, product data and financial data
• Facilitate targeted marketing based on customer and financial data
• Maximize word of mouth marketing by leveraging customer opinion and facilitating referrals, sharing and promotion of products and services by existing customers
• Meaningful management of vendors and vendor history
• Inventory and warehouse management
• Management of invoices, receipts, refunds, returns, charge-backs, bonuses, discounts, promotions and other financial aspects of a transaction
• Management of non-transactional finances like procurement, expense management, payroll, budgeting, reporting, etc.

Good ecommerce integration is critical to ecommerce success and has emerged as a specialization. The core of ecommerce integration is the design of an integrated ecommerce system based on creative marketing vision. This is where the need for professional ecommerce web design comes in.
For more information on various ecommerce elements, visit our Ecommerce Web Design FAQ page.