With your business growing and your vendors asking you to comply with data policies and integration APIs, coupled with an eye on maintaining great customer service, you will be toying with buying ARP software to manage your supply chain. But how can you integrate ERP Software for Ecommerce?
Advantages of ERP Software for Ecommerce
Well for a start you’ve made the right decision in choosing to deploy ERP system software for your ecommerce business. The efficiencies delivered by an ERP system way outweigh the cost and will allow you to scale your business exponentially without having to employ a lot more people and have to free up your cash flow for new SKU lines.
ERP systems allow you to keep a check on stock levels, automate your order process within your business, and even allow you to implement a drop-ship solution. But you will find there is still a gap between the customer ordering the products online and data entry into your ERP system to fulfil that order. There is also a disconnect between your ERP system and your accounting system.
Integration of ERP Systems with Ecommerce Platforms
Whether your point of sale is your own ecommerce website, a retail outlet, or a third party vendor such as Amazon, you can’t start fulfilling an order until the order is entered onto your ERP system, which often has to be done by cutting and pasting or by data entry. This adds cost to your process due to having to employ someone to do it, plus it can result in errors and potentially data privacy violations.
Of course there’s a solution for this! There are several software providers who have developed ecommerce to ERP integration systems which deliver orders from all sources including third parties directly into the ERP system greatly improving the efficiency of the order process flow. This software can also integrate with accounting software and third parties such as drop-ship suppliers, and logistics providers greatly improving the process, reducing time and reducing costs.
What your customer sees isn’t any different, they place their order and then it’s delivered. However they should be able to receive their order more quickly and even be provided with tracking information to see where their product is in the process. You should have less enquiries about timing of delivery, and can even allow customers to decide on their own delivery slot, again reducing enquiries into your sales team or customer service department. Data entry errors will help bring your fulfilment accuracy up toward 100%, and reduce customer complaints.
Investment in marketing, SEO and PPC to bring more traffic to your ecommerce site unless you can handle that increase in order quantities. Integration of your ecommerce system with your ERP system will allow you to rapidly grow without limitations. Couple this with a drop-ship system and potentially you can keep your personnel numbers to a minimum, allowing your suppliers to take a large margin, and therefore improve their loyalty to you, and allowing them to supply you with more varied products.