Integrated ecommerce explained
Separate substance from spiel – get to grips with integrated ecommerce
What is an integrated ecommerce solution? Is this just blusterful marketing, or is it something substantial? Does your business really need extra software? Isn’t this just another layer to think about? Another system to learn. Another programme to install?
No.
The notion of integrated ecommerce solutions is neither hassle nor buzzword. It’s real, and it will make your business better.
Consider the following questions:
- Do you operate in any online marketplaces?
- Do you have an Amazon store?
- An Etsy page?
- Can you be found on Not On The High Street?
- Do you have your own independent website?
If you answered yes to the first and last question there, and any of those in-between, then integrated ecommerce can be a major help to your business
What is ‘integrated ecommerce’?
Integrated ecommerce refers to a single software module that connects and co-ordinates all your ecommerce operations. Everything from stock levels to product listings. To understand how and why that’s so useful, consider the following three big benefits.
Simplicity and speed
Re-keying the same information for the same sets of products over and over again for different websites is a deeply tedious hassle. Not to mention all the effort you then need to go to keeping track of all the different formats shipping that notifications arrive in. Then you’ve got different offers you might be running on different websites at different times. It can become overwhelming.
An integrated ecommerce solution offers you the ability to deal with all the information from every ecommerce marketplace you use, in one place. From one piece of software, you can coordinate stock levels, shipping orders, special offers, and everything else you can think of.
Integrated ecommerce solutions make your business simpler, and your operations faster.
Astounding accuracy
Murphy’s law teaches us that whatever can go wrong will go wrong. The more moving parts to your business, the more systems you use that don’t interconnect, the more different and distinct the platforms you use, the more likely you are to encounter problems. Mistakes will be made. Errors will emerge. Orders will fall through the cracks, and when that happens the reputational and capital damage will be tough to recover from.
Integrated ecommerce solutions make errors far less likely. By keeping things simple, and managing all your different online marketplace stalls through one piece of software, you make it far harder for something somewhere to trip up.
Integrated ecommerce offers your business astounding levels of accuracy, every day.
Insightful intelligence
It can be hard to glean a full picture of your business’s performance and your customer’s tastes when all the information is scattered. Different online marketplaces provide data in different ways, with consistency sorely lacking.
Integrated ecommerce sorts all that out for you. By integrating your ecommerce systems together, as well as connecting it with other valuable business software tools, you can learn much more about how your customers are thinking about your products, wherever they might find them.
Integrated ecommerce offers you the potential for strikingly insightful intelligence into your market area.
Essential efficiency
Most businesses that don’t use integrated ecommerce, but still want to maintain a broad online presence, have only one option. Hire more staff. Without an integrated ecommerce solution, you will most likely need more staff to monitor, coordinate, and control all of your various actions across all your various platforms. But with more and more cooks working the pot, the possibility of spoilage rises dramatically. Murphy’s law comes into play again as more people can mean more problems or at the very least more cost.
Integrated ecommerce allows your staff’s time to be put to much better use. By co-ordinating all your different ecommerce activities in a single system, you’re able to have a smaller team control things far more effectively.
Integrated ecommerce offers that kind of essential efficiency that every business with a wide-ranging online presence sorely needs.
If you are interested in learning more about just what integrated ecommerce means, and what it could do for your business, contact one of the OrderWise customer success managers today. When you discover how OrderWise can optimise your operations, integrated ecommerce is only the beginning.