Here’s how a typical e-commerce journey looks like – you visit the site, add items to the cart and make the payment.
A SALE happens, right? It sounds that simple
But it’s not all that simple! – behind the scenes – It’s a lot more than that and you have multiple applications integrated, which leads to the fulfillment of the order. Right from order received to customer experience.
It is recommended that your ERP software can connect with multiple external services to ease out the business process otherwise you will end-up up integrating too many systems to manage the complete journey.
e-commerce integration is the stage between a company’s e-Commerce site and the back-end operations. The integration enables the flow of information bidirectionally between the two systems i.e. information to be captured into the system in one place.
Why should you Integrate your Business?
- Real-time Inventory visibility to customers and staff in real-time.
- Integrated supplier system, to manage suppliers’ inventory and their payout from the system itself and when needed, able to initiate a request for quotes to all your suppliers from the system itself.
- Integrating your e-Commerce sales channels with your ERP system allows you to operate more efficiently as a business in several key ways.
- The key information – order, inventory, item, customer, and shipping/tracking – are exchanged in real-time.
- Enhanced customer experience
- Centralized control of operations and ability to have various roles assigned to different users for better execution. Hence optimal use of the data i.e. Sales, customer & other stats
What if you continue with Manual Processes…
- Human negligence can cause common mistakes.
- Processing the order with incorrect shipping addresses
- Inconsistent inventory across various channels.
- Product information could be incomplete, incorrect, or even missing
- The customer experience is at stake due to missing components during the entire sales journey
Are you willing to take the risk?
Understanding ERP and eCommerce Data Flows
It’s important to understand how records or data will be exchanged between these two systems once your ERP e-Commerce integration is complete.
As you map out your data flows and their sources, ask yourself the following questions:
- Where will the interchange take place once the integration is complete?
- What about new customers?
- If one goal of e-Commerce is to drive new business, how will new customers be handled once they arrive?
- What about offline customers that place online orders?
- How will offline and online accounts be linked?
Understanding Source and Target
Source and target vary based on the information to be exchanged. E.g. once the order is placed:
- The shipping and invoice information flow from e-Commerce (Source) to the eCommerce ERP (Target) for order fulfillment.
- Later, once the order is processed or delivered the information will travel back from ERP (Source) to the e-Commerce system (Target) enabling the customer to view the order history on the e-Commerce portal.
What to expect with ERPNext Integration
NestorBird helps you to allow ERPNext integration, which gives you the flexibility to be able to account for new orders and fulfill them, regardless of when or where the sale is made, e.g.
Online order/POS Ordering/Manual sale.
Functional modules – which we get directly benefitted immediately after ERPNext Integration
