With nearly half of all shopping done online today, having an eCommerce store is quickly changing from an innovative option to a necessity for survival. Selling online not only increases revenue through eCommerce sales; studies have shown that having an eCommerce store can also lead to more in-person purchases.
To help track vast amounts of data from multichannel sales, and keep their finances in order, businesses of all sizes are leveraging the technology offered by Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) software. These applications, offered by companies like Acumatica, help with everything from customer and order tracking to invoicing to financial reporting.
While having eCommerce and ERP separately is a great starting point for your business, integration offers a simple way to maximize the benefits from both your online store and your business system. Here are 4 ways that integrating your eCommerce with your Acumatica ERP can help your business thrive.
#1: Integration Makes Your Business More Efficient
For businesses that need to meet 24-hour deliver timeframes and ever-increasing consumer demands, speed and accuracy are top priorities. Connecting your online store to your Acumatica ERP increases both by eliminating the need to manually retype order data. It gets rid of data redundancy and delays, and accelerates your order-to-cash cycle. Plus, with data verification from integrations like TrueCommerce, you can catch errors in the moment, putting an end to shipment or invoice mistakes before they happen.
#2: You and Your Employees Get Your Time Back
Not only does manual typing result in more data errors– it also takes forever. Owners we’ve spoken to say that before integrating, they would spend hours or even days each week just typing order data into their Acumatica ERP. By automating that transfer, you can take back control of your time, and refocus on your products, employees and business strategy.
#3: Better Data Flow = A Better Shopping Experience
Integration between your online store and your Acumatica ERP can enhance your customer experience in a few ways. First, sending order data directly to Acumatica lets the system immediately process the order, so your customers get their goods faster. The 2-way connectivity also lets Acumatica send inventory updates to your eCommerce store, ensuring that customers see the right inventory levels– and don’t accidentally buy something that’s out of stock. Some integrations like TrueCommerce give even more: Acumatica compatible shopping carts that let your customers choose the best shipping rates, see the taxes they’ll pay, and convert everything to their local currency. Take THAT cart abandonment rates!
#4: More Power to Grow Your Business
When you rely on manual rekeying to enter orders, your ability to scale is limited by how fast you type. That means that as you sell more, you’ll need more people, and it’ll be tough to handle volume spikes (like the holiday rush) without additional resources. Flexible, cloud-based solutions can transmit huge batches of data directly to your Acumatica ERP, where they are processed in just minutes without any extra effort from your employees. Basically, eCommerce-to-ERP integration is built to grow with you, not bottleneck you.
Implementing Integration for Acumatica
To recap what we covered, integration can save you time and money, create a better experience for your customers and help your business to scale online. Still, getting started with integration can be daunting, since many business owners worry about the disruption to their business during implementation. The most important thing you can do to help minimize interruptions is to find a vendor who has both knowledge and experience, as is Acumatica certified. After that, it’s time to sit back, rest your typing fingers, and watch your brand grow.
