18 Crucial Reasons
You Should Integrate ERP & eCommerce

According to stats, global internet access and adoption is on rapid increase, with over 5 million internet users in the world, the number of people making online purchases is constantly rising. The eCommerce market size worldwide is expected to grow exponentially from $5.2 trillion in 2021 to about $8.1 trillion by 2026.

These statistics are causing retailers to think beyond their brick and mortar stores to gain significant advantages over the competition while bringing about higher sustainability for their businesses.

Online shoppers are fickle minded, making it imperative for products as well as product related information to be consistent and available across all sales channels. This begins with inventory updates to avoid stock-outs or back orders, orders processed on time, and working towards providing outstanding customer service. To make all this possible and to maximize return on a multi-channel strategy, retailers need to ensure that their eCommerce platform is in lock-step with their Enterprise Resource Planning software.

Most retailers have their eCommerce platform and ERP systems disconnected or partially connected leading to silos of data and therefore failing to optimize business performance in many ways. Under such circumstances, valuable time is lost trying to manually synchronize data between multiple channels. Not only that, but businesses also miss opportunities to increase customer loyalty thereby increasing sales. Consider the possibility of automatically syncing data between your eCommerce and ERP system – saving a great deal of time and effort which now can be better utilized improving customer experience.

That is not the end to it.eCommerce and ERP integration benefits business in multiple ways, which is what we attempt to explore in this eBook.

eCommerce presents exciting new opportunities for businesses to acquire new customers, but more often than not businesses delay adopting them because of the increased operational overheads required to maintain an eCommerce store. eCommerce and ERP integration can significantly decrease the overheads required to maintain an eCommerce store by automating information sync and limiting information management and processing to a single system. Integration also enables businesses to leverage the rich product data in your ERP system to attract new customers through search engine optimization. With an easily accessible eCommerce store designed around the needs of customers, acquiring new customers with similar needs becomes easier.

Over the last few years, companies have established their eCommerce presence to acquire new customers and expand into new markets. With technology being the primary source driving this and considering the ever-evolving nature of technology ensuring that your systems are adaptable and scalable is important. Rising popularity of mobile commerce being a case in point.

While it is difficult to predict the future of technology, integrate ERP and eCommerce, along with other disconnected systems gives you the required cushion by minimizing overheads required to maintain these additional channels. With integration, information can be managed and controlled from one channel, orders fulfilled in another and customer serviced from a third system; all of this with the reassurance of a unified customer experience.

With such a safety net to fall back on, your business cannot be more ready to embrace change and move up the eCommerce ladder.

Build your customer persona is the advice most often given by thought leaders and leading marketers to brands for achieving marketing success. However, building an effective customer persona and putting it to a good use requires measuring customer interaction across all touch points, which is not feasible with information residing across multiple disconnected systems.

eCommerce and ERP integration helps you overcome this by centralizing customer returns, outstanding invoices, customer feedback, etc.). Armed with this information, your marketing team can now drive effective marketing campaigns, your sales team can now make informed sales decisions, and your customer service representatives can better address their customers’ concerns.

For example, armed with customer preferences your marketing team can build targeted campaigns, armed with purchase history and payment history your sales team can cross-sell & up-sell products and negotiate more favorable payment terms, armed with customer order status and interaction history your customer service representatives can quickly address customers’ concerns.

Businesses today sell across multiple channels and have customers who shop across channels and those who prefer a specific channel. To target them better businesses’ marketing efforts need to be multi-dimensional and multi-channel focused. While this can be achieved in a disconnected environment, an ERP integrated eCommerce platform emplifies the impact by driving a unified and consistent message across channels while centralizing the operational effort.

eCommerce and ERP are the two most critical systems for this – ERP is the heart of the information hub and eCommerce the most used and effective customer touch point. With eCommerce ERP integration, businesses can now leverage the information residing in their ERP system and use the power of eCommerce marketing to drive sales and business. Moreover, the eCommerce system can be extended further to support additional marketing and sales channels. This will enable businesses to centralize their marketing efforts while reaching customers across multiple channels with little incremental effort.

While businesses, in general, are all driven by trust, it plays an even more important role in eCommerce. More often than not, your customers are extending a leap of faith in your brand when they purchase from you online. By purchasing online, they risk getting scammed, purchasing a fake or damaged product, etc.

eCommerce and ERP integration can help you gain an edge over competition by building trust and confidence with your customers by giving you an ecosystem where you run your business effectively while keeping things transparent for your customers. Even simple things like keeping your customers informed about the status of their order and letting them track its progress (by notifying them or letting them see the same using self-service portals) can go a long with in establishing that trust relationship with your customers.

One of the greatest challenges decision-makers traditionally face is the availability of accurate and actionable information – often critical business decisions are made based on ‘gut feelings’ that are shaped by outdated and inaccurate data. For a business lacking integration between critical systems like eCommerce and ERP, it is not difficult to imagine why this might be the case.

eCommerce integration with ERP makes it possible for businesses to get access to reliable and accurate data, which can be used for

• Forecasting and Demand Planning (using order history & inventory levels) – input for your purchase or manufacturing department.
• Payment Terms Negotiation (using order and payment history) – input for your accounts and sales department
• Managing Payouts of Sales Commissions and more.

Not only that, but you can also now use data analytics to mine actionable insights and build reports with data collected from multiple systems. The insights gathered can then be used to drive more sales with targeted campaigns and informed sales decisions.

The eCommerce system enables you to easily reach your customers, display information and take orders. However, the orders once received have to be transferred back to the ERP system for fulfilment. Other than orders, a lot of other information exchange is required between your eCommerce and ERP systems like product & inventory information from ERP to eCommerce, customer information from eCommerce to ERP, order status and shipping information from ERP to eCommerce, and more.

In the absence of an integration, all this information will have to be manually transferred between the two systems. This is a time and resource intensive exercise that gets intensified by transcation volume. Moreover, this is also an error-prone process that can cost you a lot of money.

With eCommerce and ERP integration, the information exchange can be automated reducing errors and costs – of the manual data entry resources and losses caused because of errors that creep in because of manual data sync.

Online shoppers today shop from multiple channels (the web, mobile, social media, online marketplaces, etc.) and demand businesses to provide a consistent experience across all these channels. Centralized management of product information is critical to driving multi-channel success. Failing to provide which businesses will not only find it hard to maintain these systems (with information getting outdated frequently) but also see this having adverse impact on customer experience and the brand image.

eCommerce and ERP integration ensures that you have to maintain this information only in one system. At times, the integration also helps you mitigate the limitations of one system by leveraging the features of the other system. For example, ERP systems traditionally do not have a very good content management system or support for product images and eCommerce systems do not have a very good inventory management system. With integration, you can now leverage the content management system of your eCommerce system while synchronizing the inventory information from the ERP system enabling you to achieve the true potential of both the systems

Inventory management is a crucial aspect of any business, and it becomes even more critical when businesses sell across multiple channels disconnected from your inventory management system. Consider this – all purchase orders and order fulfilment activities are managed in the ERP system, but customers have no visibility to this as they shop on the eCommerce system.

In the absence of eCommerce and ERP integration, businesses run the risk of overselling or underselling their products which can impact both the bottom line and the customer experience. eCommerce and ERP integration can help you manage inventory better by maintaining consistent data across both the systems – which also sets the base for improved forecasting and effective demand planning.

What’s more? Businesses can further integrate other sales channels with their eCommerce systems (mobile, online marketplaces, physical stores, etc.). With ERP already integrated with the eCommerce system, selling across multiple channels while managing inventory in one system will never be so easy

Imagine this – your eCommerce store is growing strong and you have orders flowing in continuously. Your resources manually take orders from your eCommerce system and enter it into the ERP system for fulfilment. As your order volume grows, you will find a number of orders left unattended (or delayed) because your resources are not able to keep pace with the growing order volume. Result – your business growth and customer satisfaction is limited by the number of orders you can manually transfer. That is ignoring the fact that manual data transfers are usually prone to errors.

With eCommerce and ERP integration you can very easily overcome this problem – integration can help you streamline the order fulfilment process by automating information transfer between the two systems. What’s more? This new system is not only scalable (no additional resources required as the order volume grows) and minimizes errors, it also helps you save costs, and you can use your resources for a more productive activity.

You can take this setup a step further to minimize order aging by further automating your order fulfilment process automatically sync orders to warehouse, raise an invoice, ship items and then update your eCommerce store with the order status and tracking number. Your customers are bound to be delighted by the increased transparency and quick turnaround time (a key differentiator in today’s same day delivery world – you no longer have to worry about losing customers because of delays in order fulfilment.)

eCommerce and ERP integration increase organizational productivity by eliminating unproductive, repetitive and manual tasks which drives operational efficiency because of reduced errors (common in manual data transfers) and automation.

The increase in productivity and operational efficiency is not limited to this, the seamless information sync between eCommerce and ERP systems also enables you to convert your eCommerce store into self-serving customer portals.

This allows your resources to spend less time on low-value activities like phone calls, data entry, etc. and more time on things that are more critical for your business – without eCommerce and ERP integration customers are pushed to interact directly with your employees, who then refer to the information in ERP resulting in a decrease in productivity.

This while improving the resource efficiency also improves the customer experience, because of readily available information like product prices, inventory, order status, invoices, shipment status, etc.

With rising competition, changing customer expectations and growing number of channels businesses are squeezed from every direction. Customers demand businesses to be present across multiple channels and no business would like to miss any opportunity to get closer to their customers.

However, managing multiple channels as standalone systems is resource intensive (time and money) and not sustainable.
Moreover, it also is becomes very challenging to then control the user experience across all the channels. With integration, you centralize the operational aspect of these channels reducing the effort required to manage and maintain them

• Manage product and inventory information in a single system sync updates to all other systems,
• Take orders through multiple channels but fulfilment them using a single system,
• Interact with customers using multiple systems but service them using a single system, and more.

In the multi-channel environment, retailers often face the challenge of maintaining accurate inventory information for products. Often customers end up purchasing products that are no longer in stock only to be disappointed later (when the order is canceled ) – result, a dissatisfied customer who you might very easily lose to a competitor.

eCommerce and ERP integration enables businesses to avoid these situations by keeping customers informed about product availability and prevents them from placing an order (or allowing them to place a backorder while keeping them informed).

Integration not only prevents businesses from overselling but also from underselling their products. Consider a retailer maintaining inventory at multiple locations. If the inventory runs out at one location then without integration there is no way for the customer or retailer to know if the product is available at another location. This can help you not only increase sales but also churn your inventory faster.

It is important that the sales team is empowered and equipped with accurate relevant information to make a confident sale. Informed sales not only helps in closing a deal faster but also has a positive impact on customer trust and experience.

An integrated ecosystem ensures that all your customer, order, and product information is simultaneously updated across all systems. Sales representatives, equipped with this information, can now make more informed sales decisions when selling to customers. For example, they can use order history to cross-sell and up-sell products better, use payments and invoice history to negotiate better payment terms, and more.

Returns is usually a long and complex process involving multiple teams and systems

• A customer returning a product raises a request online (or with customer representative) for a return,
• sends the product back to the company or is picked up by the company itself,
• on arrival, the product and associated invoice are validated,
• an internal workflow is followed (to notify all stakeholders) and the systems are updated (inventory, accounts, etc.), and
• the required amount is then refunded to the customer (as store credit, cash, etc.)

With eCommerce ERP integration, this long and complex process can be very easily streamlined and automated. Customers can raise a request online for a return, which automatically generates a return shipping label while transferring the information back to the ERP system for approval. On approval in the ERP system, the information seamlessly flows back to the eCommerce system notifying the customer of the return status while crediting the customer’s account with the required amount. Other than streamlining the return process, this can also significantly improve the customer loyalty – 81% of all online customers desire a simplified process of returns management and 82% of shoppers are unlikely to shop at a store that makes return a hassle.

Integration can help you enhance your customer experience in more than one way.

• Consistent product information available across channels gives customers the flexibility to switch channels.
• Sales and marketing team armed with a 360-degree view of customers can build improved and personalized shopping
  experiences,
• Improved productivity and efficiency translate into more time and money to further improve the customer’s shopping
  experience,
• Automated order processing and streamlined business processes lead to increased transparency and decreased turnaround time,
• Seamless information sync enables businesses to convert the eCommerce store into a self-service customer portal that while improving customer experience also improves internal efficiency and more.

Consider this – according to Forrester estimates B2B eCommerce sales will exceed $2 trillion in 2023 and $3 trillion by 2027.

Traditionally, eCommerce is associated with selling to B2C customers and often you will find businesses serving their B2B customers with a standalone system while manually managing the communication with the ERP system. With the help of eCommerce and ERP integration, and a few advanced modules like salesperson, quotation, credit limit, net terms, etc. businesses can now extend their traditional eCommerce store to their business customers as well.

This will not only save time and money, as they no longer have to manage two systems, but also allow them to leverage the advanced B2C eCommerce functionality to provide their B2B customers an improved customer experience as their B2C counterparts

Customers today are no longer loyal to a channel, device or a brand. They shop across multiple channels, consuming information across multiple devices (switching between them frequently) and at multiple locations. They do this while expecting the brands to provide an enhanced, personalized, consistent, secure, and seamless experience across channels. However, there is no one system that can meet all your requirements and integration holds the key to omni-channel experience.

eCommerce and ERP integration can take your business one step closer to that. By adding other systems to this integrated ecosystem you can ensure consistent and uniform information across channels which then can be leveraged to drive omni-channel experience to customers.

This opens up a world of opportunity for both brand and customers – options like buy online pick up in store and others become a possibility, which earlier could not be entertained.