Today eCommerce software vendors such as order management, marketing automation, warehouse management providers should have some kind of integration with different eCommerce platforms to compete in the marketplace. Integration with eCommerce platforms enables them to work with store data such as orders, products, categories, shipments, customers, etc.
Customer information is one of the necessary store data that can be used for various business purposes. In this article, you will find out why it is necessary to integrate with different eCommerce platforms and which business cases you can implement having an easy way to import customers.
eCommerce Marketing Automation Business Cases
eCommerce marketing automation software offers store owners plenty of unique opportunities to expand their businesses.
- Online merchants can provide a subscription model to their customers and visitors to subscribe to the items they use more often. This feature allows customers to obtain a product every month or every year.
- Online store merchants can not deal manually with a large list of customers, while marketing automation programs can send a resale reminder to all store customers.
- These systems can record the order and search profile of an online visitor. This helps motivate loyal customers to visit the internet store the next time the customer comes to the online store.
- By using marketing automation software online store owners can also mail new goods, discounts, and exclusive customer deals.
Because of all this, integration with eCommerce platforms for marketing automation software solutions is extremely crucial for the effectiveness of these functions as well as an ability to import customers.
Order and Inventory, Warehouse Management, Multi-channel, ERP Business Cases
Warehouse Management, Multi-channel, Order and Inventory, ERP providers offer online shop owners much functionality. One of which is reporting on each channel to monitor the situation. As a result, such software need to access products, customers, orders, and other details to carry out this function. A reliable and successful order process for online merchants is essential.
Shipping Management Software Business Case
Some of the most beneficial mechanisms helping online retailers to optimize revenues, improve and streamline business processes in the eCommerce industry are shipping software. Thanks to them, online retailers can handle customer orders at a single location, choose suitable transportation shipping method, build and print shipping labels with all correct details, ship package, etc.
For these and other similar functions shipping software must have access to orders, consumers, and product details from online shops.
Implementation of a shopping cart connection can seem like a nightmare. Every single platform has its specialized way to store information. It also needs substantial investment in money because of the need to pay the eligible developers who will work individually on each integration. Let's see the common integration challenges in detail below.
What are the Pitfalls of Developing eCommerce Integration?
1. On average, integration development with one platform takes 4-12 weeks. That is the time when your developer will learn the logic and architecture of the platform, put effort into reducing the friction between the product and the system, and much more.
2. You can pay a few thousand dollars plus maybe extra if the need for additional development occurs. Once the integration is complete and successfully developed, it will need developer work and attention. New versions constantly appear and this means that upgrades are to be made. Plus, your clients might request modifications and custom improvements.
3. Each integration is tons of work to do and a separate thorn in the side that never goes away after the work is done. For better and more reliable results, you will need someone to be reliable and expert, and that is not easy to find and difficult to allocate if they are a part of your product team.
Simple Way to Import Customers and other Important Data from 40+ Shopping Platforms?
As we mentioned above, shopping cart integration is a very difficult and lenthy process. Even if you’ve developed an integration with some eCommerce platforms it is not the end. Regularly new shopping cart versions come out. So you will have to constantly monitor those changes and update your software according to new versions. It is not so difficult if you have the support of only one shopping platform. However, if you have more than one supported platform, the process becomes more complicated.
In that case, it is better to rely on a ready-made integration solution such as API2Cart. It enables you to integrate with over 40 shopping platforms and marketplaces like Magento, Etsy, Shopify, BigCommerce, OpenCart, WooCommerce, Amazon, and a lot of others.
The service possesses all the needed characteristics to meet unique business demands:
- Scalable and flexible infrastructure. Service provides you with the possibility to integrate an unlimited number of clients’ stores.
- Secure integration. SSL certificate is used to ensure integration security together with a 32-symbol API Key to access the system.
- Full tech support. Professional tech engineers and managers are always ready to help you solve all the problematic issues.
- Well-documented API. Both static and interactive documentation is presented to outline all patterns on how to work with the service.
- The single entry point for all shopping platforms. Integrate with multiple eCommerce platforms using a single API, overcoming all the complexity of accessing various platforms.
With API2Cart's completely integrated API, you as a SaaS solution vendor can eliminate almost all of the issues concerning shopping platform integration and save considerable amounts of money on building integration modules and on other expenses. As API2Cart makes it much easier to connect to common shopping platforms, your company doesn't need to set up separate integrations and you don't have to stress about any improvements and upkeep.
API2Cart provides more than 100 API methods that allow working with needed store data such as orders, products, customers, categories, shipments, baskets, and much more. In particular, via customer.list method you can easily import customers from multiple eCommerce platforms. You can find more information on this or other methods in our documentation.
If you have any questions about how our service works please contact us or schedule a call with our representative. We offer a FREE 30-day trial, so you can explore API2Cart features and see how you can implement your functionality with us.
