User Review
( votes)If you own a growing online business and are looking to streamline your processes, it’s likely you’re considering an ERP ecommerce solution.
Shoppers care about the quality, speed and accuracy of their online experience more now than ever. If you are still providing a disconnected experience, you are setting yourself up for disappointed shoppers, and eventually, fewer sales.
Conversely, a modern, connected ERP solution can delight your shoppers via intelligent marketing, order customization, and more.
Signs You’re Ready for a Connected ERP & Ecommerce Solution
How do you know when it’s time to choose an eCommerce solution? Here are some questions to ask yourself:
- Is it becoming harder to manage your inventory levels?
- Can you easily track customer satisfaction?
- Can your team access the data they need to collaborate and generate reports?
- Are you missing out on creative opportunities because you’re bogged down with the day-to-day running of your ecommerce site?
If you and your team are spending a lot of time on daily admin work, handling too many disconnected applications, and finding that there are just too many tasks on your to-do list, managing a growing remote business can seem overwhelming.
Getting Ecommerce Right
ERP ecommerce systems bring with them a range of business benefits. These include:
- Reduced inventory costs
- Removal of unnecessary data entry
- Improved financial analysis
- Enhanced productivity and efficiency
- More time for innovation
- Process standardization
- Automated tax compliance
- Leverage existing customer history and habits
PC Bennett offers connected ecommerce sites that are designed to:
- Enhance customer relationship management (CRM)
- Increase order volume
- Reduce inventory costs
- Raise product visibility
- Integrate seamlessly with Shopify, BigCommerce and WooCommerce
Why Acumatica eCommerce?
You have a lot of choices when looking to integrate your ERP with eCommerce. Some of the reasons we love Acumatica’s eCommerce solutions include:
- It integrates seamlessly for the important data points like: customers, customer locations, price lists, sales orders, refunds, shipments, inventory items, inventory availability, all of the things that anybody selling online cares about, and anyone who has disconnected ERP struggles with.
- It is relatively simple to set up.
- Covers all the bases, needs minimal modification. 85% of what anybody needs is covers with the default connector. Connector is native Acumatica. You aren’t bringing a 3rd party player, no separate portal where you have to manage that. Everything happens inside Acumatica.
- It supports the integration with Avalara tax processing. Sales tax is always a problematic area with ecommerce. With the Acumatica connector, we may still have some discrepancies, but they are minimal and easy to fix.
How It Improves Daily Life of a Real, Live Customer
We have a client using the BigCommerce connector. They are not touching the connector at all, all of their orders, customers and payments are brought into Acumatica automatically on a schedule. Then they drop ship the orders. All of their eCommerce is happening automatically for them. It has allowed them to increase order accuracy and customer satisfaction.
Not everyone can use that level of automation out of the gate. But when your processes are streamlined enough, you can just sit there and watch what happens. The key is a process that is repetitive, and doesn’t change from order to order. If you serve the same type of customers, with the same type of order, that are always processed the same way then you are golden. The customers are brought in automatically, orders are placed, payments are captured, payments are sent, and shipments are processed, all without human intervention.
Don’t despair if you have variety in your type of customer or input. The eCommerce connector also helps automate orders from your eBay store, or Walmart store, etc. It creates a different workflow, so it processes those orders a little differently, but it is automated. The key is that the order is always processed the same way – that is a big requirement. If you meet that requirement, the automation will work, and a real person only has to intervene when there is an error. Acumatica does a great job of that as well, sends an email to let you know when there has been an error and where to go to fix it.
Challenges PC Bennett Has Solved with Ecommerce and Acumatica
One client was struggling with their shipping solution with Shopify. Without a connector, they were forced to use a 3rd party solution which meant they had three systems for information to hop from. It was a terrible mess.
With Acumatica’s Shopify connector, it pushes the order data from the web store to Acumatica, which then pushes to shipping solution, creates a shipment in the shipping solution, streamlining the shipping process.
What if I sell both retail and wholesale?
The connector can enable you to have different rules to process different orders.
What if I assemble to order?
One of our automotive clients assembles to order. Their old solution would show all of the components on hand, but it wouldn’t tell them how many end products they could assemble. This was a huge problem, since the sales team never knew what they could promise. PC Bennett built a custom calculation, “buildable quantity”, that quickly showed how many of this or that we can build today. It was relatively simple to do, taking the parts or subassemblies, and using that calculated number of finished products are available.
Now this client uses that finished product calculated number instead of the default inventory available number as a source of number of items available in ecommerce. The connector was the key to letting us extend the functionality of Acumatica to do that.
We’re also working on a related feature, “buildable ETA”. If you don’t have the subassemblies on the shelf, you need to know when you will so you can build that item. The buildable ETA, which will tell the user where are all of those subassemblies in the production process, is based on the open orders and the step the order is in, and then calculates when this finished product can be in stock.
Ask Us Your Own Questions!
Have a question of your own about eCommerce and Acumatica? The team at PC Bennett is ready to answer them. Visit our eCommerce page, or email us at sales@pcbennett.com.
The post What You’re Missing if Your Ecommerce and ERP Aren’t Connected appeared first on ERP Cloud Blog.
