10 Reasons Why You Need Integration Tools for Ecommerce Businesses

Our five takeaways on why integration tools for Ecommerce businesses are essential:

1. Ecommerce businesses may each use over 30 separate apps and systems.
2. Connecting to all business data sources drives more accurate reports and insights.
3. Ecommerce retailers can use these insights to improve their online storefront and the overall customer experience.
4. Integration tools for Ecommerce businesses help create truly multichannel organizations.
5. Online businesses should look for a data integration tool designed for Ecommerce, like Integrate.io.

1. Connect Your Ecommerce Business Systems for a Smoother Customer Experience

Gartner recently suggested that Ecommerce businesses were built from an accumulation of at least 30 apps or SaaS, all integrated to work together. The tech experts also suggested that by 2023, 50% of digital costs for Ecommerce retailers would be spent on ensuring both external and internal systems are effectively integrated. It makes sense when you think about it. When you head off to the shoe store, you don’t have to walk down the road to a different building to try them on. You also don’t need to speak to a different company to pay for your new sneakers. For you, as a consumer, it all happens in a single store.

Of course, behind the scenes, there are wholesalers, logistics partners, payment gateways and providers, and even fitting room designers — all separate entities that are governed by different hierarchies and systems. But to you, it’s just a shoe store. That’s exactly the experience you want for your customers. They come to your Ecommerce site or online shop, they browse, they fill their shopping cart, and they check out. There are simple ways to contact you and even clickable buttons to connect to your many social media accounts. They can pay in a number of ways, from credit cards to PayPal, and have various options for delivery.

That’s the ideal consumer experience, whether you’re a B2C Ecommerce store or B2B Ecommerce website providing products or services to small businesses. This only happens if you have effective data integration tools connecting all your apps and collecting relevant data.

Related reading from the Integrate.io blog: What Is E-Commerce Integration & Is It Important?

2. Create a Genuine Multichannel Business

It’s exciting to promote your business across the many channels available. Instagram reels, shares by influencers, Facebook ads, your own blogs, and websites: There are more options available every day for ambitious online retailers. But if you’re not receiving any insights into how effective each of these channels is for your business, you’re not making the most of any of your channels. Data integration tools for Ecommerce businesses draw information from each of these separate sources into the destination of your choice, allowing you to see the impact your business is having out there in the real world.

3. Improve ROI

All business owners want to maximize their ROI. That means turning leads into conversions, cutting costs without reducing the customer or user experience, and improving the functionality of all apps that customers engage with. Data integration tools for Ecommerce businesses empower you to do just that. By leveraging technologies like ETL (Extract, Transform, and Load) to take data from multiple sources, you can keep your finger firmly on the pulse of customer needs, competitor pricing, supply chain issues, and market trends. Integrate.io goes beyond ETL by giving users access to API creation and management, allowing them to connect to the most industry-specific apps or even specific tables within internal or external databases.

4. Digital Data Integration Helps Physical Stores Too

Many businesses are hybrid retailers, with both brick-and-mortar shops and online stores. Do integration tools for Ecommerce businesses still help these types of retailers? Absolutely. Data integration connects multiple data sources, including your enterprise resource planning (ERP) software, creating a cohesive and consistent source of information that can show the effectiveness of both online and in-person sales efforts. In-store marketing campaigns can be driven by data from across hundreds of stores, while inventory management tools can ensure both online and physical retail outlets have the right products to sell. Data integration tools for Ecommerce businesses create a holistic approach to data management that’s inclusive of all sales channels, avoiding data silos and unnecessary segmentation.

Related reading from the Integrate.io blog: Why is Ecommerce Integration Important for Stores?

5. Hone Your Marketing Campaigns

There are plenty of great marketing stats out there, such as HubSpot’s insight that video is the top concern for most marketers in 2022, with 87% stating that focusing on video marketing has increased traffic to their website. But you can’t survive on other people’s data alone. You need to know exactly how effective your own Ecommerce marketing campaigns are. The only way to achieve that in a world of digital marketing and disparate social media platforms is with effective data integration tools for Ecommerce businesses. Look for tools designed with Ecommerce in mind, like Integrate.io. Connect to your CRM and social media accounts, find out exactly what customers are saying about you, and gain meaningful insight from your email marketing campaigns. This helps you figure out what’s working, what’s not, and what content resonates most with particular demographics.

6. Fine-Tune Your Content Strategy

That brings us nicely to our next talking point about integration tools for Ecommerce businesses: They absolutely drive the direction your content strategy needs to take. You probably already get some great insights from your content management system, whether you use WordPress or something more bespoke. These might include how many people click on each blog post, how many visitors you get each month, and even where in the world they come from. But your content exists beyond your own online presence. Discover where your articles are getting shared and by whom. Find out which languages posts are being translated into. According to the SEO Journal, only 5% of marketers consider their content strategy “extremely successful.” Using a data integration tool like Integrate.io with pre-existing connections to Contentful and other popular Ecommerce providers can make sure your business resides firmly within that 5%.

7. Gets Your Ecommerce Business Big Data Ready

One of the primary reasons to search for a data integration Ecommerce solution is the sheer volume of data businesses have to deal with. Entrepreneurial news site Exploding Topics reports that as of April 2022, there are 44 zettabytes of data in some sort of digital format. That’s more than 40 billion terabytes and increasing all the time. Businesses are having to deal with these increasingly large figures, and many see it as an opportunity rather than a challenge.

Big data provides companies with insights that can drive better business decisions — which we’ll go into in more detail below. Big data also drives innovation and creativity: it can make businesses more efficient as they stop doing things they don’t need to, and it can boost research and development (R&D) for retailers that make their own products or services. In fact, having a deeper understanding of customer needs and wants can’t help but drive better, more relevant products, regardless of the specific industry you sell in.

The first step to being “big data ready” is accessing all your data sources from both inside and outside your business. Data integration tools for Ecommerce businesses like Integrate.io provide businesses with easy-to-build pipelines and automation, ensuring real-time updates and a steady stream of information into your data warehouse — no matter how those data volumes increase.

Related reading from the Integrate.io blog: Big Data Analytics in B2B E-Commerce: What It Is and Why You Need It

8. Better Relationships With Partners

What partners do you have in your Ecommerce business? Many retailers rely on external warehousing solutions for storage or even the delivery of goods. Third-party logistics (3PL) providers may also deal with returns on behalf of retailers, accepting delivery of returned goods and logging vital information about the volume and frequency of these. Having access to this information is about more than simply ensuring reports are accurate and timely. Without this data, how do you know your partners are following through on your agreed contracts? How do you change processes, internal or otherwise, for dealing with these situations?

It’s easy to get frustrated with a third-party partner when things are going wrong, but accurate, timely data can help nip issues in the bud and improve communication and collaboration. Real-time info about a sudden spike in returns can prompt a phone call or an email discussion to get further details where needed or even drive a change in product development.

Optimize your working relationship with your partners thanks to data integration tools for Ecommerce businesses that ensure data is up-to-date and accurate.

9. Understand Your Target Demographics Better

We already touched on marketing and customer experience, but this is one of the most critical parts of meeting consumer expectations and needs: understanding your consumer base. This is completely impossible without effective data integration tools for Ecommerce businesses that collate details that genuinely drive change. You can determine how many people within a particular area are buying a specific product or service.

For B2B retailers, you can explore if it's startups or well-established businesses that engage with your content most often. You can break down demographics by age, job type, and even salary if you’re able to collect that type of information. Many consumers are happy to fill out surveys with information like this in return for incentives such as discounts or early access to new products or apps. You can use your integration tools to connect to services like Survey Monkey to ensure that this all-important demographic data goes straight into your data warehouse, ready to be sorted and analyzed by your business intelligence (BI) tools.

10. Achieve Accurate Reporting and Deeper Business Insights

That’s a great segue to our final yet highly important reason to invest in integration tools for Ecommerce businesses: analysis and insight. Funneling all your data into a single destination for your BI tools means you have faster access to a range of accurate reports, leading to a wealth of profit-boosting insights.

Sales reports become about more than just numbers. Effective data integration can help create charts and graphs highlighting a number of metrics, from lead generation and nurturing to reasons that customers abandoned their shopping cart. This helps drive changes to processes and prompts communications across teams and even with customers to improve UX and drive the company’s bottom line.

Reports on customer communications, such as the volume of complaints, can also be a driver in adjusting how your Ecommerce venture approaches consumers. Being able to view and sift through comments from social media platforms, emails, and even SMS messages is far more effective than only having access to one of these points of engagement.

Big data is also great for making predictions and forecasts, especially when paired with advanced BI tools that leverage basic AI or machine learning. Forecasts that are powered by accurate and fully integrated data can include supply chain issues, changes in demand for particular products or services, consumer or market trends, inventory management problems, or even a shortage of raw materials in their predictions. This makes businesses more flexible and adaptive, impressing consumers and stakeholders alike and effortlessly improving brand reputation.

Effective integration can also drive the data governance strategy for your entire business, helping you decide which products and apps to use, what data destinations suit your Ecommerce data best, and even what data policies you need to adopt as a company. This allows you to be compliant, protecting your customers’ data privacy and displays a high level of data quality and control to external stakeholders. This is particularly critical for B2B retailers, who need to ensure their own data governance policies align with that of their business partners and buyers.

Get One of the Best Integration Tools for Ecommerce Businesses with Integrate.io

All of the points we’ve mentioned here are essential to ensure your business thrives in an already crowded Ecommerce market. Online sales worldwide currently amount to $4.9 trillion, and according to Statista, this figure could grow by at least 50% in just four years. No matter how niche your products or services are, you need effective data management to ensure you’re able to grow your business and meet customer expectations. When considering integration tools for Ecommerce businesses like yours, you want a platform that’s as flexible as you are, elastic enough to grow with you, and provides what you need even during busy peak periods or times of slower demand.

Integrate.io is a new data integration platform with a range of features designed specifically to slot into your Ecommerce tech stack. It uses an intuitive visual interface, allowing users to create data pipelines with ease to over 100 data sources or destinations — including some of the most popular Ecommerce platforms and apps like Shopify, Magento, BigCommerce, Amazon Redshift, and many more.

You can manage the effectiveness of your data warehouse by using a super-fast change data capture (CDC) tool to only bring through data when changes are made, thanks to automated workflows. Update customer records in real-time and eliminate the need for time-consuming manual data entry, drastically reducing the risk of human error and customer dissatisfaction.

Reverse ETL empowers businesses to make use of that updated information to keep their customer relationship management (CRM) systems in good order and their storefronts up-to-date. Schedule an intro call today to learn more about one of the best integration tools for Ecommerce businesses and how it could help you.