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How ERP Improves eCommerce Management and Performance

An integrated ERP eCommerce solution helps retailers improve customer service and reduce costs.
How ERP Improves eCommerce Management and Performance

ERP eCommerce: The Benefits of Using an ERP Solution to Manage eCommerce Channels

If you research the buying habits of consumers around the world, you’ll discover something you probably already know: shopping online—with its click-of-a-button and deliver-directly-to-my-home benefits—continues to gain in popularity year after year. Insider Intelligence reports that global online retail sales will exceed $7 trillion by 2025. That’s trillion with a ‘T’, which means you and your eCommerce business have a potentially exciting future ahead of you.

Why potentially and not definitively?

With more than 26 million eCommerce sites worldwide, you’re not lacking for competitors—each of whom are diligently working to attract the customers you want for yourself. Thankfully, you can gain the advantage over your retail rivals by utilizing an integrated ERP eCommerce Management solution, which provides the following business-enhancing benefits:

  • Improved customer service.
  • Reduced operational load and costs.
  • Increased visibility across the customer journey.
  • Greater generated sales and profits.

Integrating the eCommerce Experience

ERP solutions act as a single, centralized database of business-wide data and are designed to seamlessly integrate with third-party applications, including world-class eCommerce portals, like Shopify and BigCommerce. Combining your eCommerce solution—which provides prolific customer information regarding preferences, behaviors, and interactions as well as shopping cart behaviors (e.g., abandonment and conversions)—with an ERP system that links and synchronizes departmental information—including sales, accounting, supply chain, and more—provides you with a complete, end-to-end picture of your business.

Cloud-based ERP solutions take the ERP eCommerce integration a step further, allowing you and your team to manage orders, returns, inventory, and more from any location. Ecommerce management software also provides you with any-time access to your critical business information, which is vitally important when managing an eCommerce website that operates 24/7 and striving to meet the needs of customers who demand immediate and accurate customer service.

 

“I was at dinner with a customer recently who asked if we had any availability on a part. With Acumatica, I was able to pull up our inventory on my phone, see exactly what we had, and let them know. It’s very nice to have that web capability.” – Ryan Brown, CEO, xByte Technologies

Amanda Datte
"When we switched to Acumatica, it really created a seamless experience for our consumer, because our data accuracy, our inventory, and the way we communicated with our customers was in one spot and created a single source of truth."
Amanda Datte, CFO
Clive Coffee

Bringing the Power of ERP Solutions to Your eCommerce Channel

The following three pillars represent a major benefit of an ERP solution for your eCommerce business.

  1. Building a Stronger Experience

In retail, customers are the lifeblood of any business, which means the customer experience (CX) should be at the top your priority list. Your goal is to encourage people to become—and remain—loyal customers, and there are two main factors that will help you succeed: the quality of your product (along with the price) and the quality of your customer service (before, during, and after the purchase).

The value and importance of these factors is borne out by HubSpot research, which reveals that 93% of customers who receive excellent customer service will make a repeat purchase. To ensure you’re providing the service customers expect, employ HubSpot’s “4 points of leverage in the customer lifecycle”: understand your customers’ goals, simplify the purchase process, invest in your customers’ success (e.g., gather feedback and provide a FAQ page), and use your customers as a source of referrals.

Fortunately, an integrated ERP eCommerce management solution can assist you with these customer-focused initiatives. With customer and business data at your fingertips, you’ll know what customers want and at what price range, enabling you to cater to your prime customer base. In addition, most ERP solutions provide self-service customer portals, which allows you and your team to engage and communicate with customers during every touchpoint of the customer journey.

  1. Reducing Costs and Improving Operational Performance

ECommerce ERP solutions increase visibility into your operations, alerting you to any ongoing or potential pain points before they become major roadblocks. Real-time data from your customer-facing and back-office systems is available through personalized dashboards, putting you on top of order, inventory, shipment, and return statuses, thus reducing operational costs and improving overall performance.

  1. Greater Accuracy and Automation

Finally, an integrated ERP eCommerce management solution automates your business processes, from order fulfilment to bank reconciliations and beyond. Manual data entry, which is fraught with human error, becomes a mere memory and inventory accuracy becomes a reality.

For instance, if you have multiple sales channels which pull from a single inventory, you can manage all orders and inventory allocations within the ERP solution. The information, which is automatically recorded in the ERP system, transmits immediately and accurately to your eCommerce software.

Hear from Our Customers

Our technology costs are now 33 percent cheaper and we have 10 times the functionality. Our organic traffic is up 45 percent, and we are selling more because we are off NetSuite and on Acumatica. We’re implementing actions and a forum on our site, which we couldn’t do before. We wanted it for years and years, and there is a long list of marketing things we can do now that we couldn’t before.” – Dave Munson, CEO/Founder, Saddleback Leather Co.

“We have dashboards that show orders printed but not shipped and are greater than a day old. We can build views that identify potential issues before they become a problem. We now have the data visibility and accessibility to identify our core customers, understand their challenges, and support them with tailor made gardening solutions. We can do all of this at scale now by leveraging cutting edge technology thanks to Acumatica.” – Ethan Platt, President & Co-Owner, American Meadows

“With everything built-in, our invoices now directly populate into our revenue and onto our P&L, and executives can pull information at any point in time. They can see how profitable we are this month. They can see what we’re purchasing. They can have many questions answered at any point in time.” – Amanda Datte, CFO, Clive Coffee

Our eCommerce Edition

Acumatica’s Retail Management Software provides you with a flexible, affordable, and mobile cloud platform that seamlessly unites with web stores, POS devices, and other essential third-party applications while offering native integrations with Acumatica’s Sales, CRM, Financials, Fulfillment, and Inventory applications. Data flows uninterrupted between every application, providing updated, accurate information on a true omnichannel platform.

 

Success Stories

"I had a million ideas but all of them were impossible with Oracle NetSuite. Now, I sleep, dream and hope - three things I was not able to do with NetSuite."
Dave Munson, Founder and CEO
Saddleback Leather
"I don’t know how we would have handled the initial Covid-19 outbreak without Acumatica. We were able to make the switch to be fully remote within a few days."
Ethan Platt, President & Co-Owner
American Meadows

See what’s possible when you have a future-proof ERP platform that truly puts customers first.

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