Why eCommerce features and integration are important for your online businesses?

Well, a webstore has got various processes and components that an eCommerce solution streamlines via easy interface where a regular business user can work on. Hence, future upgrades depends on the flexibility of eCommerce platforms to integrate on other solutions like CMS, ERP, CRM, email marketing solutions, payment gateways, social media tools, accounting solutions etc.

As you are aware, the eCommerce industry is massive! eMarketer predicts eCommerce business to drive in sales worth $4 trillion by the year 2020. Hypermarkets and Supermarkets are losing its popularity these days as users prefer to buy online. For the very first time, 51% of the shoppers prefer online platforms rather than going with traditional shopping means. Certainly, thanks to the growth in eCommerce sector that has boosted the growth in eCommerce solutions as lot of businesses are setting up online stores or collaborating with 3rd party providers to take advantage of their brands online.

Typical features for your E-commerce Software to kick start your business!

For your eCommerce platform to function smoothly, you will need the below components:

Web Hosting

Most of the eCommerce solutions offer web services as default for hosting your webstore with all the necessary features to go with it. As a result, it is important to have a good online store which is easily accessible, having a great bandwidth (handling larger web traffic) and faster load time.

Catalog

This is the key for any eCommerce business. Your online customers are going to view and learn about the products that you have put for sale. Compared to a printed catalog, it is made up of pages, products and information where your customers can browse. It is very important to have a flashy and attractive designs to capture your customers in addition to adding value to your brand and organization.

Shopping Cart

From our experience with customers, having glitches with your shopping cart is going to be a nightmare. Never ever comprimise on the final checkout area page as this is where customers think twice before making a purchase. Also, If things go wrong here, its more like having a department store with nobody walking in! Different payment options needs to be enabled for smooth payment transactions.

Also, marketing solutions these days are integrated with the shopping carts, so reminder emails can be sent to the customers that has atleast 30% chances of converting a sale from an abandoned sale. It needs to work smoothly and optimally.

Vendor Interface

As an eCommerce business provider, it is equally important to setup Vendor Dashboard/Interface along with Customer and Administrator Dashboards/Interface. Similarly, please note that the vendor user interface needs to be flexible, robust and definitely, customizable. You don’t have the luxury to keep training your vendors and instead, that time can be saved for something else.

Inventory Management

Along with payment processing areas, inventory management is equally important in a webstore. This needs to be updated live as you might expect thousands of customers making transactions in seconds. eCommerce businesses hire a lot of personnel just to manage inventories. However, for smaller businesses, hiring lot of employees is going to be a cost overhead. Solutions such as x2x eCommerce helps you integrate their tools with your top-notch eCommerce platform for automating inventory management areas, that will eventually cut employee overheads.

Order acceptance and logistics

You will have to deal with various 3rd party logistics providers to ship your items to different locations ensuring faster delivery. Your eCommerce platform should support these functionalities ensuring smooth handling of logistics and order fulfillment. SMS services used for efficient tracking of shipments for both employees and customers are perfect for a webstore. Having an integrated tool like x2x eCommerce will help you manage your webstore from end to end seamlessly.

x2x eCommerce with Retail Management Hero (RMH)

As a result, x2x eCommerce platform integrated with Retail Management Hero offers amazing features such as:

• One place to manage Retail and eCommerce stores.
• Integrates with Microsoft RMS and Retail Management Hero (RMH).
• Download orders; and upload items, prices, quantities, and catalog.
• Connects with Magento and Shopify.
• Above all, connectivity with Woo Commerce and Amazon will be coming soon.
• Sell on eBay, Jet and other marketplaces.
• Multi-device compatible.
• Warehouse Management System compatible.
• Custom eCommerce app for iPhone/Android

 

How an online retail can benefit using RMH and integration suite?

We, x2x eCommerce have worked with several retailers both as consultant and as solutions providers for the past 3 years. First of all, we learnt that there isn’t a single-fit ecommerce team and often, the team structure keeps changing based on the business conditions. Let’s take a typical example of a shoe retailer that has focus on branding and photography. These organizations will have top-notch CRM suites and data/digital analytics team. Above all, the number of people required for an eCommerce team will keep changing depending on the SKU’s that are available. The marketing budget also plays an important role too.

 

 

Typical departments for an online retailer

1. The Executive Team

Well, it seems like mostly the team is run by the Vice President of eCommerce or eCommerce Head. Similarly, in some organizations, the Chief Digital Officer or Chief Marketing Officer takes care of this department.

2. Marketing

The Marketing team will be involved in the following tasks:

1. Customer Relationship Management
2. Acquisition
3. Loyalty
4. Digital Marketing

Also, for larger organizations, they will have dedicated team to work on Email Marketing, Social Media support and even Search Engine Optimization.

3. Inventory Management

There will be several roles in this team which includes buyers that work on sourcing the products. Visual merchandising or web merchandising roles are brought in for specific categories. The analytics team and buyers work together for managing the featured products in the eCommerce portal.The eCommerce websites follows manual interventions instead of personalzation tecnologies/recommendation engines where the team sizes are large.

However, solutions like x2x eCommerce has comeout with a fantastic suite that helps users to manage inventory with ease!

4. The UX Team

This business can’t run without a perfect UX Team (How are we regular users going to start using their website, if it isn’t fancy?). This team focuses on creating mockups/prototypes and generates initial customer surveys through usability testing. They will work in parallel with the software developers to comeup with a final website. Most of the mid-sized organizations outsource these divisions, however, having a dedicated UX Team is always an asset to an eCommerce business.

Apart from the above, other major departments are:

5. Operations
6. Development
7. Analytics
8. Customer Service
9. Finance and
10. Projects

Now let’s get into the actual topic as how an online retail can benefit using RMH and integration suite?

Watch: Seamlessly integrated Shopify with Retail Management Hero (RMH)

Well, the good news is that x2x eCommerce has got Magento – Retail Management Hero (RMH) as well as Shopify – Retail Management Hero (RMH) integration suites. Our participation at Retail Realm 2018 Partner and User Conference was overwhelming and received great feedbacks from stakeholders and partners of the event.

Read: Our take at the Retail Realm 2018 Partner and User Conference

Manage your Retail and eCommerce website under one roof

How about managing your Retail and eCommerce website under one roof? Let’s check out the features that you can benefit by choosing x2x eCommerce with RMH:

1. It helps you to connect your Magento and Shopify platforms easily (WooCommerce  and Amazon integration suites are under development and will be available by end of Q2 2019*)
2. Managing your orders? No problem! It helps you upload inventory, quantity, catalog and prices in few clicks.
3. Sell your products via Jet, eBay and other top-notch marketplaces
4. The solution is compatible with all your devices (PC, laptop, tablet PCs and smartphones).
5. You also get to experience the Warehouse Management System in x2x eCommerce Suite.

Why x2x eCommerce – RMH integration suite for your eCommerce store?

Why x2x eCommerce? You can kick start your eCommerce sales away using your well known webstore platform. Having your retail solution like RMH and x2x eCommerce suite will keep your webstore updated at all times!

What’s the most interesting part, you don’t need to hire an extra person to take care of your website everytime. When adding items to your POS, using x2x eCommerce, you can replicate them onto your webstore in no time. You will be able to update pricing information as well as available stocks easily using x2x eCommerce suite.

Our Recommendation

Therefore, to get started, we strongly recommend you to try out our Retail eCommerce Lite version where you can manage your webstore orders to your Retail Management Hero (RMH) solution and maybe go with this only feature as a start and see the results for yourself! Consequently, you can always upgrade to more features in long run.

Why x2x eCommerce?

We come with over 18 years of software expertise in retail solutions and integration suites for the top-notch solutions available today. Hence, our software experts are always there to support you on how to manage your eCommerce webstore solution with Retail Management Hero or Dynamics RMS.

Click here to request for a “FREE” quick demo today!

Series – Choosing the Best eCommerce Integration for your Marketplace – Part II

We have been hearing a lot from our customers. There are thousands of options available today and I’m pretty sure sellers feel overwhelmed with the features and support offered by several vendors.

Previous Blog – Series – Choosing the Best eCommerce Integration for your Marketplace

What will be the first thing you would do when you are all set to start an online marketplace? We’re referring to the webstore with a perfect suite to handle product listings, product image integration, multi-tier and customer centric item pricing, real time web order and invoice integration complemented with mobile ready and powerful analytics features.

The good news is x2x eCommerce assists sellers with a wide range of eCommerce tools to enhance your webstore. Do you require the store inventory to sync with your webstore sales? For a start. that’s something you should be thinking about.

If you have an eCommerce Website

For sure, having a standard eCommerce website alone won’t help you sort out your invoices/stock issues. You need to consider integrating your eCommerce solution with your ERP suite. You don’t need to hire someone to work on your eCommerce website/portal. There are ready to deploy solutions like x2x eCommerce to save your time and money! This is a great solution for marketplaces who want to kick start quickly and flexibly adapt to quick changes and manage their webstore in the backend with x2x eCommerce integration tool.

How much you need to spend?

Should you pay the money upfront or pay as you go? Well, you got both the options! Now that’s really flexible for businesses that are small or larger enterprises. Let’s say you need to offer online payment gateway, but not focused on investing more time or resources on logistics or advertising to boost your business – that’s where the inexpensive pay as you go subscription works well for you. Down the line, if you reconsider your plan by implementing an expensive and a full-fledged solution that can boost your webstore such as SEO, email marketing integrations, product stock management, logistics etc., choosing a solution like x2x eCommerce will surely add value without any hassle! So, keep in mind, upgrade or downgrade, possibilities are endless!

Do you need a store inventory suite to sync with your webstore?

Yes! Yes! That’s a very important requirement! Imagine managing all your inventories using an integration tool right from your top-notch ERP solution within minutes? You really can’t afford to employ someone to take care of thousands of your inventory daily right (If you can afford, well, yes)? It’s also going to save lot of time and hassles.

 x2x eCommerce – Innovative eCommerce-ERP Integration

x2x eCommerce is a revolutionary solution that combines the power of Retail Management Hero and  Microsoft Dynamics GP and Enterprise eCommerce for a feature rich, fully optimized, responsive and multi-device friendly web store that can be managed all within Dynamics ERP. Once deployed, start selling more with lower TCO!

Ready to start setting up your webstore with x2x eCommerce Integration Suite? Get in touch with our experts to learn more!