More 35 years of introducing, electronic commerce (commonly written as e-commerce) creates great influences on commercial market and even economy. With the continuous development of Internet, customers have trend to choose e-commerce products instead of going to supermarket.
E-commerce markets strongly develop with launches of many e-commerce platforms and software. It opens better opportunities for merchant to sell product online. However, each online store needs many support systems to control his business, which makes server run slow. The management will become more complicated when using more discrete system such as accounting system, POS system, dashboard system and shipping & inventory software.
Many businesses have e-commerce shopping cart with ShipWorks for controlling orders, QuickBooks for accounting, Endicia for postage, Google Analytics, PayPal and so on. Customer data and product information are updated in many systems that are not synchronized with each other. With an order of customer, business has to update information in all systems. In many case, you must check information manually through many steps in different systems. Management is spending a lot of time and labors to finding, controlling and reentering data. Unfortunately, this still do not help business activities be fast, safe and effective. A little change in order leads a lot of change in total systems, which has many potential risks of losing a lot of money, confusing orders, purchasing out of stock products, putting the wrong shipping address. Three quarter of business has problem when running control systems with no connect. Eighty-five percentage of business, which have both online store and retail store, makes sale mistakes because of not timely synchronizing system. It not only causes customer dissatisfaction but also decreases company’s reputation.
The best solution is control systems in sync with e-commerce shopping cart. Businesses need to integrate systems together to increase revenue potential and reduce operating cost. Integrating systems is not simple. It is a long process from writing an integration module. You can have trouble about retrieving and syncing data (products, orders, categories, customers, etc.). Integration expenses are quite high.
Experts suggest businesses use an integration tool instead of integrating systems themselves.
Source: http://litextension.com/
