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The five best e-commerce integrations for your online store are:

  1. CRM platforms for keeping track of customer data and interactions across sales channels.
  2. Marketing tools for email marketing, SEO, social media, and more.
  3. Payment gateways for handling customer payments.
  4. Website builders for creating attractive, scalable, easy-to-use storefronts.
  5. Data warehouses for centralizing your data and conducting in-depth analytics.

There are a wide variety of e-commerce software platforms out there—Shopify, BigCommerce, Magento, WooCommerce, PrestaShop, Ecwid, and more—each with its own e-commerce features and functionality. But beyond the question of the "best e-commerce platforms," how can you enhance these platforms with third-party integrations?

As we all know, integrating your e-commerce store with other apps and services helps you run your business more efficiently and effectively. But what are the best e-commerce integrations, add-ons, and plugins? To get a head start on this topic, see this article.

Looking for a simple, user-friendly e-commerce data integration platform? Sign up today for a 7-day pilot of Integrate.io.

1. CRM Platforms

Today, e-commerce websites are connecting with their customers across more channels than ever—from site visits and email marketing to social media, mobile apps, and customer support. Of course, this means that e-commerce sites need a way to keep track of all this multi-channel interaction and communication.

That's where a solution like CRM (customer relationship management) comes in. CRM platforms help sales, marketing, and customer service teams keep track of all their data on customers and potential customers. Salesforce is the dominant player in the CRM market, with other offerings from Microsoft, Oracle, and SAP taking a smaller but healthy percentage.

Using a centralized platform like a CRM makes it easier to analyze big datasets for insights so that you can make data-driven decisions to improve the customer experience, attracting and retaining more customers. To enjoy the freshest, most up-to-date analyses, it's essential that you transfer data out of your e-commerce platform and into a CRM on a regular basis.

2. Marketing Tools

Once you've identified your marketing strategies (ideally with the help of a CRM), the next step is to put them into practice with marketing tools. The options at your disposal include:

  • Email marketing: Your email marketing list is one of your store's most valuable assets. A dedicated email marketing tool can help you streamline and automate the sending process and then track the performance of your marketing campaigns.
  • SEO tools: SEO (search engine optimization) is a key inbound marketing tactic for online businesses to drive traffic to their stores. SEO tools such as SEMrush, Moz, Ahrefs, and Google Analytics can help you with keyword research, link building, and more.
  • Social media: Social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Instagram, and TikTok are another invaluable method of generating and sustaining interest in your products. E-commerce websites need tools to help them coordinate and automate their social media marketing campaigns across all of these platforms, as well as respond to customers in need of assistance.

Your choice of e-commerce platform should be able to integrate with these marketing tools so that you can understand the performance of different marketing campaigns and their effects on your business revenue.

Data integration platforms like Integrate.io can help integrate your e-commerce platforms, CRM software, and marketing tools in an all-in-one solution. See for yourself today with a 7-day pilot of Integrate.io.

3. Payment Gateways

It's crucial that e-commerce companies support a wide range of payment options, from credit cards to payment processors like PayPal and Stripe. If online shopping customers can't pay in a manner convenient to them, they're likely to leave your storefront and abandon their shopping cart.

For e-commerce businesses, a "payment gateway" is the virtual equivalent of a POS (point of sale) terminal that you see in a retail store. This tool works behind the scenes to perform payment processing and process a variety of payment methods: credit cards, debit cards, check, money order, cash, or cryptocurrency.

The choice of the best payment gateway for your e-commerce business will depend on your needs: not only payment methods, but also questions such as the level of transaction fees and how to handle foreign transactions and currencies. Regardless of which payment gateway you choose, it needs to seamlessly integrate with your e-commerce store so that the checkout process can be as smooth and barrier-free as possible.

4. Website Builders

E-commerce store owners have enough on their plate without needing to build their own website as well. Fortunately, there's no shortage of website-building tools that can help: Wix, WordPress, Squarespace, and more.

These platforms have broken down the barrier to entry for e-commerce businesses. They make it easy to construct an e-commerce website front-end and backend, even without knowing a shred of HTML, CSS, or JavaScript.

Depending on your choice of website builder, these tools can do everything from registering a domain name to purchasing SSL certificates. Some are free and open-source to use, while others charge a recurring or one-time fee. Many of them are highly customizable, with various templates and themes that you can download to make your website more attractive and distinctive.

Of course, your choice of e-commerce platform and your choice of website builder need to easily integrate with each other to present a unified storefront. Some robust e-commerce solutions, such as Shopify, include their own website-building tools. Others, such as Ecwid, are e-commerce plugins that are designed to integrate with an existing site.

5. Data Warehousing

Specialized platforms such as CRM and ERP (enterprise resource planning) software are good for certain types of data analysis. If you want a robust, enterprise-wide data storage and analytics solution, however, you're better off with a platform such as a data warehouse.

A data warehouse is a centralized system for aggregating, storing, processing, and analyzing information from a wide variety of sources. These sources may include databases, internal applications such as your e-commerce platform, and third-party files and websites.

Once information has been loaded into the data warehouse, you can start mining it for business intelligence and analytics purposes. Using a "single source of truth" like a data warehouse has several benefits. For example, all teams and departments can access and use the same data, ensuring that everyone is on the same page. Fresh, up-to-the-minute can be easily generated for key decision-makers on a recurring basis, using the information most recently loaded into the warehouse.

How Integrate.io Can Help with E-Commerce Integrations

By combining the power of your e-commerce solution with the best e-commerce integrations on the market, you'll be well on your way to growing your customer base, increasing your revenue, and making your team more productive and efficient. Now the question becomes: what is the best e-commerce integration for data warehousing and data integration?

The good news is that you don't have to look far. Integrate.io is a feature-rich yet user-friendly data integration platform that makes it easy for anyone to construct robust, automated data pipelines.

Integrate.io offers more than 140 pre-built connectors and integrations—including Shopify, Magento, and BigCommerce—so that you can build exactly the data workflow that fits your current IT environment. You can then use these integrations within Integrate.io's intuitive, drag-and-drop visual interface, which is easy to use for even non-technical users.

Want to see the benefits of Integrate.io for e-commerce businesses for yourself? We're here to help. Get in touch with our team of e-commerce data experts today for a chat about your situation, or to start your 7-day pilot of the Integrate.io platform.