The eight best product integrations for e-commerce stores are:
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Website builders for customizing your e-commerce website.
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Payment gateways for handling customer payments.
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Marketing tools for attracting and retaining customers.
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Data warehouses for performing business intelligence and analytics.
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CRM for managing your customer relationships.
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Customer support for resolving customer issues and queries.
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Inventory management for overseeing product stock levels.
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ERP software for streamlining and optimizing business processes.
How can startups and entrepreneurs hope to compete with online business juggernauts such as Amazon and eBay? To give your online store the greatest shot at success, you’ll need to carefully consider your technology stack. The first step is likely selecting one of the most popular e-commerce platforms, such as Shopify, BigCommerce, Magento, or WooCommerce.
Once you’ve chosen one of these best e-commerce platforms, however, there’s still more work to be done. It’s essential that small business owners have e-commerce websites with a cohesive, united storefront. This means that you’ll need to connect and integrate your e-commerce software with third-party systems and applications that extend its functionality.
The next question is: which product integrations for e-commerce stores does your business need the most? In this article, we’ll go over 8 of the top product integrations for e-commerce stores, so that you can enhance your website with the right e-commerce features.
Looking for a simple, user-friendly, all-in-one tool for e-commerce product integrations? Sign up today with Integrate.io for your 7-day pilot of our e-commerce data integration platform.
1. Website Builders
You might have the business savvy to run an e-commerce site, but you lack the website design and development skills to create the website yourself. That’s exactly why website and page builder tools (such as WordPress, Squarespace, and Wix) are one of the best product integrations for e-commerce stores. These platforms come with many templates, plugins, and add-ons that enable you to customize the online shopping experience. They may also handle other concerns such as web hosting, domain names, and SSL certificates.
2. Payment Gateways
One of the most essential product integrations for e-commerce stores is the payment gateway. This is a payment processing service that enables e-commerce merchants to accept the customer’s payment information, similar to a POS (point of sale) device in a brick-and-mortar store. Widely used payment processors include Square, PayPal, and Stripe. Look for a payment gateway that accepts the payment methods you want to use in your store, from credit cards to gift cards.
3. Marketing Tools
To attract customers to your e-commerce website, you’ll need a suite of marketing tools. These include software for SEO (search engine optimization), email marketing, social media, and more. With the right marketing product integrations for e-commerce stores, you can evaluate a number of tremendously valuable metrics and KPIs (key performance indicators). For example, if too many customers are abandoning their shopping cart, or clicking away from your landing pages and product pages, marketing tools can help you identify and resolve the problem.
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4. Data Warehouses
Marketing tools are useful enough, but the full power of your e-commerce data is only unleashed when you store it in a centralized data warehouse. Data warehouses are big data repositories that are optimized to contain information from across the enterprise, making it easier to run analytics queries and uncover hidden trends and insights. Your e-commerce website will need an efficient way to extract this information from various sources, transform it as necessary, and then load it into the target data warehouse.
Integrate.io is a powerful, user-friendly integration platform built especially for your e-commerce data needs. Try it out for yourself with a 7-day pilot.
5. CRM
A CRM (customer relationship management) platform is one of the best product integrations for e-commerce stores that want to increase their revenue and improve the user experience. CRM software helps businesses keep track of their interactions with customers and potential customers across all of their sales channels: website visits, purchases, emails, phone calls, and more. By storing all of this multi-channel data, CRM solutions help businesses understand how to optimize their sales, marketing, and customer support teams, and can boost revenue and customer retention rates. Studies have shown that the average ROI (return on investment) for CRM software is more than $8 for every dollar spent.
6. Customer Support
Beyond a dedicated CRM, another one of the most valuable product integrations for e-commerce stores is a customer support tool. Platforms such as Zendesk, Intercom, and Freshworks help you create and manage tickets for your e-commerce customers, ensuring that no question or problem is overlooked. By storing all this information in a customer support platform, you can easily calculate crucial metrics such as response time and customer satisfaction rates.
7. Inventory Management
E-commerce companies that sell physical items (not digital products) need to stay on top of inventory management. One study has found that e-commerce stores are losing $22 billion annually due to products being out of stock, and 15 percent of customers made the purchase from another store. Inventory management software helps you avoid lost revenue by monitoring the number of products that you have in stock at a given point in time. You can use these platforms to monitor stock level trends over time or to send alerts when a given item is running low.
8. ERP
Last but not least, ERP (enterprise resource planning) is one of the best product integrations for e-commerce stores. ERP software helps you automate, streamline, and optimize your business processes across departments such as accounting, human resources, logistics, and project management. Larger e-commerce businesses, or those that are looking to expand in the near future, can greatly benefit from integrating their e-commerce platform with an ERP solution.
How Integrate.io Can Help with E-Commerce Integrations
Thus far, we’ve discussed some of the best product integrations for e-commerce solutions. The next question is: how can you actually connect all of these different systems, platforms, and applications? The answer lies with an e-commerce integration solution like Integrate.io.
Integrate.io is a powerful yet user-friendly ETL (extract, transform, load) and data integration platform that has been built from the ground up for your e-commerce needs. With Integrate.io, you can use automation to build fast, efficient data pipelines from your data sources to a centralized target location, such as a data warehouse or data lake. Integrate.io emphasizes simplicity and ease of use, with more than 140 pre-built connectors and a visual drag-and-drop interface for users of any skill level.
What’s more, Integrate.io includes a very fast CDC (change data capture) functionality so that you can quickly and efficiently detect only those records that have changed since your last data integration job. Integrate.io’s reverse ETL feature ensures that businesses can also export their information out of the data warehouse and into third-party systems for easier access and analysis.
Ready to learn how Integrate.io can benefit your e-commerce business? Get in touch with our team of e-commerce data experts today to discuss your situation, or to start your 7-day pilot of the Integrate.io platform.