Integration Platforms for E-Commerce Businesses

The Top 5 Takeaways:

1. Data integration platforms help e-commerce businesses get their apps and systems working as one to optimize efficiency.
2. ETL tools reduce the need for manual data entry, minimizing the risk of human error and avoiding time-consuming, repetitive tasks
3. Intelligent data integration systems are fully scalable, growing with e-commerce businesses and allowing them to add connections as needed.
4. Faster systems and more intuitive web forms and checkout processes vastly improve the customer experience and customer loyalty.
5. io is the data integration platform built for e-commerce, improving company decision-making and helping bring operational systems together. 

Maybe your primary focus is online retail. Maybe you just have a small digital store selling merchandise relating to your main business concerns. Whatever the size of your e-commerce venture, integrating your systems and data is vital. You’re probably already dealing with a number of different platforms and SaaS providers, integrating with their APIs and their services to help run your business more smoothly. The data each of these services provide can be essential in improving sales and customer experience.

A data integration tool like Integrate.io can bring all your e-commerce data into one place and even load data into systems like Salesforce to make your life easier. Let’s explore the key reasons why all online retailers should be exploring the best integration platforms for e-commerce businesses.

Get All Your Business Apps Working Together

Not all systems and apps naturally integrate with each other. You might have useful connections between your customer relationship management (CRM) system and your e-commerce platform but no links to other business apps. You might have useful data from social media monitoring tools, but how useful is that data if it sits entirely separate from the rest of the information driving your online retail strategy?

As a successful online retail business, you’re likely to use multiple apps to run your business every day. Being able to combine the data from these apps into a single destination for analysis by business intelligence tools or to feed that data into other systems creates a more seamless, unified system for your e-commerce business. A key example of this is when your inventory levels feed directly into your online store, providing instant notifications to shoppers when an item goes out of stock.

Integrate.io is a very fast change data capture (CDC) and ETL platform designed to effortlessly create data pipelines from numerous popular SaaS and apps to help bring your e-commerce data into one place. The CDC functionality ensures that changes made within a database get reflected in linked systems, often in real-time. For example, if a customer updates their contact email address, this datapoint would change in Salesforce and any other system that requires the email address, such as Mailchimp. ETL stands for Extract, Transform, and Load, and means the capability to take data from various sources in various formats and load it into a data warehouse for storage, analysis, or even further distribution—the simplest way to get all your e-commerce related apps and systems integrated.

Reduce Manual Data Entry

One of the major advantages of integration platforms for e-commerce businesses is that by having a wealth of data available and unified across various systems, you’re cutting out the need to manually type the same information out again and again. That applies to both customers and employees. Integrating Salesforce with e-commerce platforms like Shopify or Magento means that all the customer’s details are there as soon as they log in. They don’t have to repeat inputs like their name and email address every time. It also means that if you have several shops linked to your business, customers won’t have to manually create a fresh account from scratch each time. Forcing customers to create an account during checkout can be a retail turn-off. In fact, 23% of shoppers abandon their cart completely if required to set up an account at this stage.

Collecting your customers’ contact details and keeping them up-to-date and accurate is more vital than you might think. As well as being able to contact a customer regarding existing orders, 20% of e-commerce traffic comes from email marketing. Manually entering phone numbers, email addresses, or shipping addresses can lead to errors – especially if you’re having to type hundreds of these every day. Collecting that data automatically from other systems reduces the risk of human error, increasing efficiencies and creating a better experience for your customer.

Integrate.io not only integrates directly with Salesforce, it also offers bi-directional integration, allowing data to be taken out of Salesforce, transformed, and reloaded as necessary, as well as feeding it into a data warehouse or other repository.

Scalability

As an online retailer, your ambition will always be to grow – to get more customers, reach more demographics, and increase your brand reputation. With that in mind, it’s important to have SaaS and business apps that can grow with you. Integrate.io is highly scalable. With new integrations all the time, you can start with a few links between your online shop and CRM, then increase to include your enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems, business intelligence tools, and even inventory management resources to really streamline your processes.

A scalable integration solution allows your digital storefront to grow s slowly or as quickly as suits your business strategy.

Improve Customer Experience with E-Commerce Integration

Very few companies only have one engagement point with customers. You’re talking to them via Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, your blog, your website, and your online store. As an omni-channel business, it’s important to get a 360 view of your customer experience. Integrating data from all your customer engagement point can provide this, allowing you to see what increases the customer experience so you can replicate it – and what leaves customers cold, so you can cut it out.

Customer service is a big driver when it comes to what companies consumers choose to shop with. 60% of American consumers prefer to use digital self-service tools to get help or customer service. Ensuring that your online tools have as much business-relevant data connected to them as possible is key to keeping those customers. As well as FAQs and help topics, your data integration platform could help bring together similar queries or customer complaints to help customer service associates quickly see what solutions have worked in the past, and what communications have increased customer loyalty.

Integrate.io is One of the Most Powerful Integration Platforms for E-Commerce Businesses

Integrate.io is a new ETL platform, an integration solution boasting the ability to perform reverse ETL capability and a focus on deep e-commerce capability. Higher quality data allows you to improve your business decision-making for boosted profits. It empowers you to improve your ERP and plan for the next stage of expansion for your e-commerce venture. It’s a low-code to no-code platform, meaning you don’t have to worry about the details of what’s going on in the back-end. You can fine-tune automation of tasks to cut down on manual processes and increase operational efficiency, and demonstrate meaningful improvements in user experience or online sales to your stakeholders.

Talk to us today about pricing or to book a demo.