Essential Integrations

When you’re looking at our available integration flows, you’d be forgiven for being a little intimated by the number of options on display! But don’t fear – this post will give you a brief guide to navigating the individual integration flows, so that you can better identify what your business needs.

Let’s break down the key flows:

• Products: Integrating products is the bread-and-butter of any eCommerce integration. Copy-and-pasting data for hundreds or even thousands of items from an ERP or PIM into an eCommerce store is an extremely painful and time-consuming process, and it’s easily avoided with an automated sync of data between the different systems.
• Inventory: Hand-in-hand with products, online stock levels are extremely tricky to keep current, and so an automated live sync of inventory levels is a great way to easily avoid stock-outs or overstocking.
• Orders: Orders are at the heart of eCommerce operations, and automating the transfer of this data between your eCommerce platform and an ERP or accounting system can greatly reduce the risk of errors and delays.

Together, these three integrations form the core of eCommerce operations, and it’s for this reason that most of our integrations usually include at least two of them. If you’re after a basic integration, those are the workflows to look for. However, there are yet more options:

• Payments: Processing customer payments can be one of the most time-consuming aspects of eCommerce management; fortunately it’s also one of the areas we automate the most. Payment integration can involve automatically sending details to your ERP, carrying out reconciliation, generating or closing invoices, enforcing B2B payment rules, and more!
• Customers: Syncing customer details between accounts on your webstore, and those on your backend CRM or ERP will unify and simplify customer management, whilst also unlocking powerful eCommerce features such as customer-based pricing, online invoices and special discounts.
• Pricing: Particularly important for B2B eCommerce, automatically integrating unique product pricing rules on an eCommerce store can align your offline and online selling, without hours of tricky manual management.

These last three are slightly more advanced than the former set, but no less important; especially if you have a selling style with lots of unique business rules. You may also notice some commonalities between workflows, i.e. products and pricing, or orders and payments. This is no accident – integrating many workflows can be very efficient, and it’s easier than it looks to automate multiple pipelines at once.

Finally keep in mind that these are only the six ‘core’ workflows we offer through our Get Started webform, but there’s a whole other world of options, including integrations for shipping, files, taxes, reviews – we can integrate all the data one can use on an eCommerce store! With that said, the core six workflows of Products, Inventory, Orders, Payments, Customers, and Shipping are the most common, and hopefully you’ve now a good understanding of what each one entails. Of course, please don’t hesitate to Contact Us if you want to find out more!