The Ultimate Guide to E-commerce Integrations

The five key things to know about e-commerce integrations are:

• E-commerce integrations help eCommerce platforms interact with other applications such as CRM, ERP, payment gateways and marketing software.
• E-commerce integrations help break down data silos, reduce manual effort and improve visibility across your organizations.
• The challenges of implementing e-commerce integrations include legacy systems, data quality issues and a highly complex web of data sources and targets.
• Point-to-point connectors are quick and easy for small businesses but lack a way to centrally manage them, making the job of your IT team more difficult.
• A dedicated e-commerce integration platform is the best way for larger and growing businesses to handle all the connectors that they need to migrate data throughout the organization.

Whether you use Shopify, BigCommerce, Magento, WooCommerce or another option entirely, there's no shortage of e-commerce platforms for you to choose from. However, the platform itself isn't an all-in-one solution for your e-commerce business. Instead, you need to enhance the platform's functionality by integrating it with other applications and systems in your IT ecosystem.

E-commerce integration is a must-have for any e-commerce website, but it can be a complicated and time-consuming process—especially if you're trying to do it manually. To make things easier, we've put together the ultimate guide to e-commerce integrations, so that you can find what you need fast and start selling faster.

Looking for the best e-commerce integration tool? Try Integrate.io out for yourself today with a seven-day pilot.

What Are E-commerce Integrations?

In the field of information technology, an integration (also called a connector) is a link between two unrelated systems or applications that enables them to communicate and share data. An e-commerce integration, therefore, is an integration that helps e-commerce businesses connect their e-commerce solution or platform with other applications in their IT environment.

These other apps may include:

• CRM (customer relationship management) software like Salesforce for tracking omnichannel interactions with customers and potential customers to improve the user experience
• ERP (enterprise resource planning) for streamlining and optimizing business processes
• E-commerce marketing tools (e.g. email marketing, SEO and social media) for powering your online shopping business model
• Inventory management and order management software for handling customer orders and product stock levels
• Payment gateways and POS systems for processing customer payments

Thanks to these integrations, e-commerce companies can synchronize and update the data flowing through their IT environments via automation.

What Are the Benefits of E-commerce Integrations?

The benefits of e-commerce integrations include:

• Less manual work: Without a way to perform integrations automatically, e-commerce websites have to rely on manual data entry and migration. Not only is this manual work time-consuming and tedious, but it's also highly error-prone. Using eCommerce integrations enables you to automate this process and become significantly more productive and efficient.
• Breaking down data silos: Data silos are datasets that are only available to a single team or department within an organization, even when other people could benefit from using them. e-commerce integrations make it easier to spread information throughout the organization, breaking down these silos and providing key data-driven insights.
• Greater visibility: Integrating your data across your e-commerce store offers complete visibility into the operations of your online business. eCommerce integrations ensure that the people and software that can benefit from using eCommerce data have access to it at all times.
• Better data-driven decision-making: Any information you collect in your e-commerce platform will be more powerful when integrated and analyzed in combination with other data. By crunching the numbers, you can discover how to increase your online sales and improve the customer experience in your storefront.

What Are the Challenges of E-commerce Integrations?

Despite the many benefits of E-commerce integrations, there are also challenges that you'll no doubt face during the implementation process. Your E-commerce site must have a winning strategy to deal with issues such as:

• Legacy systems: Some E-commerce websites are weighed down by clunky, outdated legacy systems that are very challenging to integrate with the rest of your IT environment. The longer these systems remain in place, the more difficult it will be to update and modernize them.
• A vast range of data sources and targets: E-commerce integrations can have any number of sources and targets: there's your eCommerce platform, of course, but also other software applications, databases and data warehouses, third-party websites and files and more. Your choice of eCommerce integration solution must include connectors that can effectively transfer data between the places it needs to go.
• Data quality problems: Even with your E-commerce integrations properly set up, your data workflows could still suffer from quality issues such as duplicate, inaccurate, inconsistent or out-of-date information. Without a means to improve this data quality, you'll be suffering from "garbage in, garbage out," harming your insights and forecasts.

Solving these E-commerce integration challenges is much easier when you have a dedicated data integration platform like Integrate.io. See for yourself today with a seven-day pilot of the Integrate.io software.

How To Integrate Your E-commerce Platform

We've discussed both the advantages and the difficulties of E-commerce integrations. But one question remains: how can you integrate your E-commerce platform and data with the rest of your IT environment?

Perhaps the simplest solution is to use point-to-point connectors that integrate a single application or system with another. This approach is both quick and cheap since you can use a "pay-as-you-go" approach as your IT ecosystem expands and changes.

However, point-to-point connectors also come with various disadvantages. Most importantly, there is no way to centrally manage or administrate the entire network of connectors. This means that troubleshooting and recovering from crashes and failures can be significantly more challenging.

As your E-commerce business grows, you'll likely want a dedicated solution for E-commerce integrations that offers many different connectors under one roof.

How Integrate.io Can Help With E-commerce Integrations

For E-commerce businesses with demands greater than a simple point-to-point integration, a powerful, robust data integration tool is necessary. That's exactly where Integrate.io comes in.

Integrate.io is an ETL (extract, transform, load) and data integration solution that helps E-commerce businesses integrate their data across the enterprise. The Integrate.io platform comes packed with more than 140 pre-built connectors and integrations, including ones for Shopify, Magento and BigCommerce, so that it fits perfectly into your existing data workflows.

With Integrate.io's no-code, visual drag-and-drop interface, it's never been easier for anyone to construct their own automated data pipelines to a centralized data warehouse or data lake. Integrate.io's FlyData CDC (change data capture) tool helps users detect and capture only those records that have changed since the previous integration job. In addition, Integrate.io offers "reverse ETL" capabilities that let you move data out of the data warehouse and into specialized third-party systems.

The perfect solution for your E-commerce integration requirements is here: Integrate.io Get in touch with our team of E-commerce integration experts today to discuss your business needs and objectives or to start your seven-day pilot of the Integrate.io platform.