By Margaret It is difficult to choose the best B2B ecommerce platform. It is important to consider features, expandability, and total cost of ownership as well as how the platform will affect your business’s future. The platform’s integration with your existing technology stack is another aspect that adds complexity.
These integrations are crucial for optimizing technology solutions. Each ecommerce investment must have a role, core responsibilities, and expectations. Each player brings unique and complementary skills to the table, just like in-person teams.
Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP), in particular, is a significant part of an organization’s technology investment. It is a key component of your infrastructure and responsible for managing key business functions such as accounting, finance, inventory, or other operations services. It is vitally important. Many businesses use their ERP systems to solve specific business problems.
What benefits can you expect from an ecommerce ERP integration that is well-thought-out and runs smoothly?
1. Data Collection, Sync And Value
Platform integrations are often thought of as data being passed back and forth between two systems. We value a successful sync that allows us to send orders from ecommerce to ERP or update inventory from ERP to ecommerce.
This is possible because of seamless integration between both systems. Each system can be extended to support data collection by tightly integrating with the ERP and ecommerce.
Customers will have a better experience on-site with accurate and live inventory throughout the entire catalog. Customers will be delighted by new product suggestions, promotions, or discounts that are tailored to their needs.
It is also easier to manage customer service aspects, such as backorders and out-of-stocks. This can help customers feel satisfied. These problems can be avoided and customers will have a better experience.
2. Reduce ERP Burden
It is important to assess how much stress you are putting on your ERP’s day-to-day functions. Problems can arise when you expect a software product or service to do more than it is capable of. These problems can lead to system slowdowns and poor performance.
Businesses often recognize these problems and try to solve them by adapting in ways they didn’t expect. This leads to increased resource strain and feature stretch, which contributes to system inefficiency.
Connecting your ERP service with an ecommerce platform will remove commerce burdens from your ERP. All ecommerce-related features and strains are eliminated.
3. Be Customer Friendly & More Efficient
Integrations between ERP and ecommerce functions can bring about direct customer benefits.
Consider the customer portal, which is a crucial aspect of your B2B website. This tool provides important functions to the customer and decreases the need for service personnel to directly interact with buyers.
- Purchase & Payment Options
- Account information updates
- Details about the address book
- Tracking in-transit orders
These feature sets are not the most exciting, but they are essential for long-term customer relationships. This self-service portal eliminates the need to manually enter data and paperwork and allows your service team to focus on other tasks, such as relationship nurturing and lead generation.
4. Expand On What You’re Already Doing
Integrations between ERP and ecommerce systems allow your sales and marketing teams greater freedom to sell. The digital storefront will be optimized to give them the tools they need for creating unique customer experiences and brand offers.
This system makes it easy to evaluate options, test them, and optimize them over time to get the highest conversion rates. They might even be able to sell products and services not considered B2C.
This benefit is a result of the need to be flexible in business. Businesses must be able to react quickly to new opportunities and strategies.