E-commerce is a modernized way of selling products at relatively lower costs. It has changed the way in which enterprises do business and communicate with their consumers. For almost every type of retailer, putting an online store has become a need. The online stores offer various benefits for retailers, as well as customers. However, maintaining an online storefront can become a huge, and arduous stress for retailers, if the storefront is not integrated with their Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system.

The Reason Behind Integrating E-commerce With ERP?

Usually, businesses overlook the need for integrating e-commerce with ERP due to cost or business interruption caused by having to modify current systems. However, when you see the effect of this integration on your operations, as well as customer experience, the costs seem to be worth it.

When you integrate e-commerce sales channels with your ERP system, it enables you to function even more competently as a business. The key types of data, such as shipping/tracking, order, customer, item, and inventory are all linked to your independent systems.

There are some types of integration, which pass this data between your systems automatically, thus eliminating the need to enter data from one system to another, manually.

Hand-keying the sales orders into ERP is a painful and time consuming process. It involves a lot of hassles in updating product data in Excel, and then uploading to the web store. If you are dependent on reducing inventory in your systems manually, or not able to do it all, then it can cause you to oversell. There are a lot of chances to make mistakes as these processes are not automated. Some of the common mistakes include:

• Wrong shipping addresses

• Incorrect inventory levels

• Missing, incomplete, or incorrect product information

In short, when you dont integrate e-commerce with ERP, you put your consumers experience, and your business at stake.

Also read “How Cloud Technology Help Your Ecommerce Business To Scale And Handle Global Expansion“

Benefits of ERP Integration with an E-Commerce Storefront

Here are the seven major benefits of integrating your e-commerce storefront with ERP system:

1. Reduces Data Redundancy, Human Involvement, and Error:

With the integration of e-commerce storefront, the payment & shipping information, web orders, and web customer details are integrated to ERP system. In the similar way, it helps to upload the details ofitem and inventory from ERP to the e-commerce portal. Thus, in any way, the integration helps eliminate the requirement of re-entering the data. In turn, this helps reduce data redundancy, human involvement, and error.

2. Reduces Operation Costs:

The real-time data, which is available from the ERP system on to the storefront, enables consumers to view latest order status, available inventory, as well astrack shipments with tracking numbers. Automated data inputs help save on errors, re-works, and order backfires. All these benefits help reduce operational costs.

3. Increases Internal Productivity:

Integrated systems play a vital role in streamlining several business processes. This has helped lessen the involvement of human resource in the processes. The web sales orders are integrated to the ERP system in real-time, and this helps a back office ERP user to track the order instantly and start with the further processing. Thus, integration reduces the order fulfillment cycle.

4. Reduces Inventory Cost:

All the information about web sales appears in your ERP system promptly. Based on these web transactions, ERP item inventory will also get updated. Thus, with up to date information about inventory and web sales, an ERP user can plan the purchase in a proper way, thus reducing inventory costs.

5. Increases Customer Satisfaction:

With an ease of getting up to date product information, order tracking details, and inventory availability detail from ERP system, increases the satisfaction level of a consumer.

6. Generates Financial Reports in ERP:

Financial reports of sales are generated by e-commerce applications. By integrating of e-commerce with ERP, it helps the business to produce trial balance, balance sheet, cash flow, and P/L Statement, which gives the required clarity in financial information.

7. Better Control of your Business:

By integrating e-commerce storefront with ERP business processes, it helps business owners to get better control of their business, thus giving competitive gains.

You can also read 5 Benefits of eCommerce Mobile Applications

The main benefits of integrating e-commerce store front with your ERP are as above. Now, it is time that you comprehend these benefits and adopt them for the success of your business. As a whole, availability of precise, and up to date order and consumer information makes it easier to deliver a good customer service.