5 Reasons E-Commerce Integration is Important
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Ecommerce integration helps connect all of your business systems together.
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Integration allows you to gain better visibility into your customers, orders, and other data.
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The right integration platform improves the accuracy and efficiency of your operations.
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Good integration practices will improve the customer experience from end to end.
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Specific outcomes of integration include better inventory management and marketing.
If you own an online store, you may be wondering: Why is ecommerce integration important? The term "integration" is likely something you've heard tossed around quite a lot. However, if you have yet to pursue it, you may be stuck trying to figure out how integration can help your business grow. Or, you may be struggling with the next best step to help you realize its benefits.
If you've been searching for an integration solution that offers a lightning-fast CDN, deep ecommerce capability, and easy, low-code integration, this is the guide you need. So, let's walk through the answer to the over-arching question of why is ecommerce integration important and explain how to achieve it more easily with the help of integrate.io.
What Is Ecommerce Integration?
The topic of ecommerce integration is something we've explored in-depth in previous blog posts, but most businesses want to know: Why is ecommerce integration important? Before we dive into its many benefits, it's worth a quick recap of the concept. To understand integration, you must first step back and think about all the apps and tools that your ecommerce store needs.
Your primary services would include the point-of-sale (POS) system, along with your marketing tools, inventory management database, and any platforms that help you interface with logistics and shipping providers. When it's all said and done, modern ecommerce companies easily require dozens of apps and tools.
All of these apps and tools are generally provided by different vendors. For that reason, tying them all together can be tough. Not only does that introduce inefficiencies and complications, but it also means that your customer data is distributed across lots of different platforms, which is less than ideal for visibility, marketing, and customer service purposes.
Now that you have this complex big picture in mind, ask yourself: Why is ecommerce integration important? Because it brings all of your different apps, tools, and services together. Integration is the "glue" that helps connect your fundamental business systems. Integrate.io does so in a simple, straightforward, and seamless manner.
Integrate.io is a new ETL platform with features that make it appealing to ecommerce brands of all sizes. Plus, it even provides pre-built connectors to help you integrate more quickly with any system, new or old. As a result, you get to enjoy all of the following benefits.
Why Is Ecommerce Integration Important?
Now you know the technical definition of what integration can do for your business, but that alone doesn't make all of its benefits obvious. To help you fully understand why ecommerce integration is so important, here are some of the many ways it will support your company's growth.
Integration Improves Visibility
As you begin utilizing more tools and services to support your ecommerce business and its growth, you're soon to find that a lot of your customer data is distributed across different systems, vendors, and platforms.
For instance, your CRM system might contain detailed information that you can use to personalize your marketing campaigns, but you could improve the user experience even further if you integrated your CRM with other back-end systems, like your order management software. By doing so, you would be able to see their past orders next time you go to segment them into a marketing list or invest in direct advertising.
You can also use integration to connect your Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) solution with the rest of your systems. Regaining visibility is one of the main reasons why ecommerce integration is so important. By having a highly integrated ERP system, you can eliminate redundancy in business processes and streamline workflows to reduce human error, save time, and ensure that your team is meeting key business needs.
Integration Supports Data Governance
It's well-known that having siloed data is bad news for your business. Aside from giving you visibility into what data is where, integration allows you to swiftly move, control, and protect data that's stored in your various systems. That means it helps to eliminate siloes and support another key business goal: governance.
Even if you aren't in an industry with stringent and specific regulations, like HIPAA laws in the healthcare sector, privacy standards and compliance regulations continue to grow stricter. For that reason, data governance tops the list of reasons why ecommerce integration is so important for businesses.
Integration services can help support your data governance strategy, which in turn supports data privacy, compliance, and quality control. Your customers will thank you for protecting their personal information while you're able to offer greater transparency into how you're actually collecting, keeping, and using that data.
Integration Informs Business Intelligence
As a direct result of having greater visibility into your data, and better control over all of it, integration platforms also help support your business intelligence (BI) initiatives. For instance, integrate.io can help you effectively manage your data using advanced ETL and reverse ETL processes.
These tools handle "Extract, Transform, and Load" operations, which in turn give you the chance to find, manipulate, and share data to various systems. One of the most valuable systems you can integrate with is your business intelligence dashboard. Using an integration platform like integrate.io, your business can unlock real-time insights derived directly from the data you already have on hand.
Benefits of Ecommerce Data Integration
We've talked about why ecommerce integration is important in a broad sense, but what specific benefits can your business expect by investing in an integration platform? Without a doubt, choosing to invest in a new endeavor like e-commerce integration is a big decision, so let's talk about the real-world ways it can positively impact your company and customers.
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Manage your inventory better: Automated inventory management eliminates the time-consuming and error-prone manual data entry you've been spending so much time on. Meanwhile, you'll find it easier to keep your best-sellers in stock and avoid over-stocking on less popular products. Plus, real-time updates ensure you never oversell an item.
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Automate order tracking: Send notifications to your customers automatically to keep them in the loop throughout every stage of the fulfillment process. Provide more accurate delivery estimations so they aren't disappointed by a late arrival. Plus, anticipate delays in advance, so you can let them know and help keep them happy with a coupon, discount, or personal apology.
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Personalize your outreach: Remember, one of the main reasons why ecommerce integration is important is because it helps you compile and access data more easily. As a result, you can impress your customers with truly personalized outreach that shows how much you value their business. Beyond using their name in the subject line, integration allows you to offer personalized recommendations on your site and in advertising. Plus, you can better segment buyers by tracking their interactions on and off your site.
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Expand to new channels: Reach more customers and stay in touch with your existing customers more frequently by using integration to expand to new channels. Seamlessly start marketing through email, text, or direct mail with new tools. Plus, use push notifications and other features to keep customers excited about your sales and launches.
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Know when to push promotions: Stop wasting money offering discounts when a customer is already about to pay full price and stop losing buyers to abandoned carts because a sale wasn't happening. With business intelligence tools, you can offer targeted, smarter promotions that help drive sales, up-sells, and repeat purchases across your entire customer base.
These benefits still don't encompass all of the perks your ecommerce business could discover by using an integration service, but they do represent the biggest possibilities. By knowing why ecommerce integration is important and how to implement it, you can stay one step ahead of the competition and keep your edge sharp in today's highly competitive markets—you just need an integration tool to help you take action.
The next question is simple: How do you get started? Whether your ecommerce website runs on popular software like Magento or Shopify, or even your own custom-built infrastructure, integration is easy to achieve with the right partner. If you haven't already explored integrate.io and its possibilities, here's an introduction to help you get off on the right foot.
How To Get Started With Integrate.io
So, why is ecommerce integration important? Because it can help super-charge your data governance, business intelligence, and marketing efforts while cutting time out of your workday. And, if all that sounds too good to be true, think again. Integrate.io makes creating an integrated ecommerce business simple, even if you have limited technical experience.
With thousands of pre-built API connectors and a low-code platform, Integrate.io will help your business integrate all of its marketplaces, sales channels, and third-party software in a snap. All you need to do is schedule a time that works for you to get started with your intro call, so you can see for yourself how integration can improve your ecommerce brand. Want to learn more before scheduling a call? Check out some of our other blogs or email hello@integrate.io for more information!