For your eCommerce B2B software, store data is an inevitable part of your business process — whether you provide an order management system, shipping management, marketing automation, price optimization, or any other solution in the niche. Since this information is stored on shopping carts, integration with eCommerce platforms is vital to running your core processes.
However, developing integration with shopping platforms by yourself is quite a painful process. It would be one thing if you only needed to connect with a single shopping cart, but retailers run their online stores on many different eCommerce platforms, and each one behaves differently.
This is why it makes sense to consider a ready-made third-party shopping cart integration solution to overcome the challenges of connecting with multiple platforms. Below are the key signs that indicate your business needs third-party help.
# You spend a huge amount of money on developing each integration with a shopping cart
As mentioned above, being a B2B eCommerce software provider means you need to integrate your service with different shopping carts and marketplaces. For example, order management systems need data about orders and product details, inventory management systems have to access stock details, and warehouse management systems require shipment and delivery information. In short, all your services depend on information from shopping platforms.
Integration is expensive. It can take thousands of dollars to connect with each shopping platform. If you're building integrations one by one, and each one costs thousands of dollars, think about how much you spend once you need a dozen integrations or more. On top of that, you're paying professional developers for quality integration work, plus ongoing costs for maintenance and updates.
How sustainable is it to manage massive expenditure on integrations alone, leaving less budget for your other essential functions? A third-party shopping cart integration solution can offer a more cost-effective scenario.
# You risk losing new clients because each integration takes too much time
As you know, integration is a complex task involving hard work, expert knowledge, API building, and various technicalities to run it efficiently. Each shopping cart is different and presents a new challenge for developers. Building a single integration can take around a month, and you may have many integrations left to build — all while also handling maintenance for the ones already in place.
If you're stuck facing time constraints and your integrations aren't keeping pace with demand, your engineers may be doing their best, but it won't always be enough. Clients won't wait indefinitely. That's a good reason to reconsider your strategy and move to a solution that can deliver integrations faster.
# You run into problems when new shopping cart versions come out
Say you've built integrations with several shopping platforms, and your systems have been accessing data from them effectively — until the shopping carts get upgraded. Platforms switch to new versions to provide a better user experience, but your engineers built integrations based on the previous versions, and now they're facing problems accessing data from the current versions of those shopping carts. You may end up with incorrect data or even lose data during transfer.
Rebuilding those integrations from scratch means an extended timeline to redevelop all of them. A better alternative is switching to a third-party solution that handles version updates for you.
Third-party solution for cheaper, faster and easier shopping cart integrations
Fortunately, there's an effective way to integrate with various platforms without building and maintaining everything in-house. API2Cart provides a unified API to retrieve and operate with the necessary store data from 70+ shopping carts and marketplaces, including Shopify, Magento, PrestaShop, WooCommerce, Amazon, Etsy, and others. You can review the broader landscape of platforms in this list of popular eCommerce marketplace services.
This kind of third-party shopping cart integration approach lets your team focus on your core product instead of reinventing connectors for every new platform — an approach that fits well with modern, low-effort ways of running and connecting your store.
The detailed documentation makes the API easy to work with, and a dedicated, tech-savvy support team is available to help with any questions. API2Cart protects clients' personal and store information from unauthorized access, so their customers can be confident about their data security.
If you're interested in integrating your B2B solution with many shopping carts and would like to discuss the technical details, please schedule a call with our representative or try how API2Cart would work for your business.
