If you haven’t reaped the benefits of ERP e-commerce integration, it’s time for your business to investigate how to integrate your ERP and e-commerce platform.
e-Commerce has been hot for a long time now, and there’s no signs of it slowing down. Over 2 billion people purchased goods or services online in 2020, for example, and online ordering for all aspects of business and personal needs has easily become the norm. In order to provide the best service to your business customers and maximize your business’ profitability and efficiency, it is vital to ensure that all your business platforms are connected.
Reasons to Proceed with ERP E-Commerce Integration
Your e-commerce portal is the system that interacts with your customers. From there, customers can view products and prices, place orders, and perhaps (depending on the system you have in place) manage their accounts.
An ERP, on the other hand, manages the “back end” data of your company. Flowing through your ERP system is data from accounting, finance, operations, marketing, and inventory control. Ensuring the data from the e-commerce platform flows into the ERP makes sense in this light. ERP e-commerce integration ensures a complete 360-degree data view which ensures all areas of the company are in sync.
The Benefits of ERP E-commerce Integration
Looking at ERP e-commerce integration granularly, there are five main benefits of ensuring the platforms are connected.
- Easily manage multichannel sales and inventory
- Track items and reduce returns
- Increase order accuracy
- Improve business intelligence
- Enhance customer satisfaction
- Manage multichannel sales and inventory
With integrated e-commerce and ERP, it’s easier to manage multichannel sales and inventory. Data flowing through the ERP from each sales channel can be synchronized and updated with inventory data, providing real-time information on stock counts and inventory. This enables you to quickly reorder low stock and manage customer expectations, delivery times, and more across multiple sales channels including field sales, e-commerce sales, and call centers.
- Track items and reduce returns
A consistent pattern of returns may be hard to spot across multiple, disparate systems. ERP e-commerce integration ensures items and returns can be tracked throughout the system. Accounting can issue refunds, inventory can add stock back into the warehouse, and any problematic batches or products can be identified and returned to the wholesaler or distributor.
- Increase order accuracy
Manual data entry leads to mistakes. A call center operator may accidentally transpose digits, leading to incorrect pricing or SKUs. Your business may be losing hundreds or thousands of dollars per month to manual data entry errors. ERP e-commerce integration helps improve order accuracy.
- Improve business intelligence
A single view of business activities through the ERP dashboard ensures managers get both the big picture view of the business as well as the ability to drill down into specific areas of interest. An ERP system offers excellent business intelligence data which is enhanced with e-commerce information once the two platforms are integrated. Reports that tap into both data sets also enhance the ability to make decisions based on data.
- Enhance customer satisfaction
It is frustrating to customers when call center personnel cannot access all their data. If your e-commerce system is separate from your ERP solution, it may take the call center or customer service agent longer to find information that could be at their fingertips. Additionally, information pushed to the e-commerce platform from the ERP system, such as inventory levels, can provide customers with up-to-date information to make their purchasing decision.
Ready for ERP E-commerce Integration?
With billions of dollars spent via e-commerce each year, companies that aren’t harnessing the power of ERP e-commerce integration may be losing valuable data that can help them improve their businesses. If you’re ready for ERP e-commerce integration, contact Emerald TC.
Emerald TC
Emerald TC provides software and consulting for manufacturing companies. We can help you choose the right accounting software, ERP system, payroll, or other software for your needs. Contact us or call 678-456-6919 for more information.