Why Integrate eCommerce and ERP?

Most ERP implementations include integration with third-party add-ons to allow for such things as payment processing and tax compliance.

eCommerce integration with ERP system lets you avoid data duplication and/or manual data entry — allowing you to keep multiple systems in sync while ensuring you have a single version of truth. Integrating your eCommerce sales channels with your ERP system allows you to operate more efficiently as a business. Your main types of data – order, inventory, item, customer, and shipping/tracking – are communicated between your once independent systems.

eCommerce can be deployed as a standalone solution, but manually entering or exporting/importing data from the eCommerce store into backend systems is time intensive; which means, as a merchant, you are not able to provide an accurate view of product data, available inventory or latest pricing and promotions in real-time. And if shipping and tracking details are not sent on time, it can cause significant disruptions in merchandise procurement and delivery, leading to customer dissatisfaction, returns/refunds and eventually loss of revenue.

When these processes aren’t automated, it’s easy to make mistakes. Shipping addresses can be entered wrong. Incorrect inventory levels can lead to overselling. Product information could be incomplete, incorrect, or missing.

Ultimately, your customer experience is at stake, when you don’t integrate.

Business Benefits of eCommerce and ERP Integration

#1: Reduce manual entry to save time and increase throughput while reducing errors, when entering order, inventory, item, customer and shipping data

Accurate and intuitive product classification is also extremely important in ensuring that consumers find what they are looking for fast. Product attributes that are relevant to product categories make it faster for your customer to find the product they are looking for in a large catalog.

Having a robust integration that reads data feeds in real-time for new or updated products is extremely important in ensuring that all your channels have the same version of truth.

#2: Provide up-to-date order information, including shipping and tracking data

Both B2C and B2B customers want up-to-date information on the status of their orders.

B2C customers want to get their tracking details, not just on the entire order but on individual items as well.  They also want the ability to have in-transit details aggregated from multiple shipping carrier and email notifications once an item is shipped.

#3: Inventory Integration – eliminate manual data entry and costly errors

Avoid manual data handling errors and save time by syncing products & categories. Information are being fetched at regular intervals from NAV to Magento.

#4: Provide competitive shipping rates and services by integrating with third-party shipping APIs

As a merchant, you may have negotiated rates with shipping carriers, or may support only specific shipping methods – which means that these shipping methods are all configured in your ERP system.

With an integrated web store, you can have shipping rates and services pulled directly from logistic carriers, and the shipping rates you support in your ERP system. The integration between the ERP and the eCommerce store enables the store to seamlessly display the supported rates and services that are in the ERP.

#5: Use a PCI certified solution to ensure security with credit card processing

As a merchant, you do not want to take on the liability of saving credit card data even though you want to offer credit card as a payment method. eCommerce systems use tokenisation, meaning the payment gateway does the authorisation and then returns a token, which is saved instead of credit card details.

These tokens are integrated into your ERP system, so that even if you change the order in your ERP and the order value changes, you can still process payments without having the credit card details. This way the transaction can start in eCommerce and you can complete it in the ERP system without having to store any credit card data in either of the systems.