Essential Integrations You Need for Your eCommerce Store
Starting up a new eCommerce store, or perhaps do need to overhaul your existing one? Depending on your workflow, there are a range of integrations available for different eCommerce platforms to suit the needs of any business model. Thinking about what you need to increase sales can inform the types of integrations you need to reduce administration all round.
These are some of the best integrations that your online store needs to provide a good user experience in the front end, and make store management an easy process in the back end.
Payment Integrations
You need a payment processing system to be able to process payments from customers, and you can’t have an eCommerce store setup if money isn’t able to flow through it. A “payment gateway” or “payment integration” essentially refers to an automated system that communicates with your shop, with the customer, and the bank that is facilitating the transaction. It verifies your customer’s details, account balance, etc. If you’ve ever bought anything online, the payment integration is essentially the system that manages and supports the sale. That includes everything from the moment you click “checkout” through to receiving a digital confirmation email. If you offer a subscription service, make sure that your payment gateway offers subscription management.
Some of the most well-known of payment integration systems include:
- PayPal
- Square
- Stripe
- Braintree
- Authorize.net
- 2Checkout
- Payline
Shipping Integrations
Having an integrated shipping system that can auto-calculate shipping rates, generate shipping labels and track orders using shipping and delivery management integrations is excellent for customer experience. Nobody likes to find out that they’re going to be hit with a $55 shipping fee just as they were about to click “confirm and pay”. A well-executed shipping integration will allow you to let your customers know how much they can expect to pay for shipping early on, track their packages during the shipping process, and have their postage show up with generated labels containing user-provided information. The shipping integration system will handle everything after your payment integration system. This is all from the moment the customer makes the transaction to the moment the package arrives at their doorstep.
Some popular shipping integrations include:
- ReadyToShip
- Shippo
- ShipStation
- ShippingEasy
- Ordoro
Analytics Integrations
Not just for eCommerce setups but for all website platforms, using some form of web analytics is a powerful way to understand what makes your customers tick. Analytics platforms can tell you how long each customer usually spends on your site, where you’re getting most of your traffic from, and where your customers are based geographically. Find out the pain points on your eCommerce store and find the products that are loved by customers to adapt your strategy with the intention of increasing sales.
Keep track of sales with some of these handy analytics tools:
- Zoho PageSense
- Google Analytics
- Shopify Analytics
- Adobe Marketing Cloud
- Looker
Inventory Integrations
Inventory management interactions are especially important for businesses that offer a large product selection, or if they sell products on multiple platforms. These integrations ensure that you can fulfill all orders by getting automatic updates on low stock levels or automatic reorders. You can do things like changing product prices across various platforms using inventory integrations. Effective inventory management makes for smooth sales via more channels.
Manage your inventory with integrations such as:
- Zoho Inventory
- Finale Inventory
- Ecomdash
- Fishbowl Inventory
Accounting Integrations
Accounting integrations are a must to automise your bookkeeping procedure. Use accounting integrations for things like payroll, budgeting, cash flow statements, purchase-and-sales charts, profit-and-loss charts. If your accounting software can communicate with your eCommerce store, this can make life easier when it comes to the backend management side of things.
Keep on top of your accounts using integrations like:
- Netsuite
- Amaka
- FreshBooks
- XERO
- Quickbooks
Email Integration
Email is a great way to reach your customers directly. You can use a newsletter integration to help you gain new potential customers to add to your CRM (see below), and send EDMs (“electronic direct messages”) straight into their inboxes. You can tell them about the latest products or follow up with an email campaign about their favourite items. Capture your audience’s interest by sending personalised, targeted emails to your customers using an email integration software.
These are some popular email marketing solutions that can be integrated into your store:
- Salesforce
- Debounce
- Campaign Monitor
- Emma
- MailChimp
- GetResponse
CRM Integration
CRM stands for “Customer Relationship Management”, and this is an essential integration to capture information on potential customers or existing ones. A CRM allows you to collect information and build up a database, and then maintain your strong relationships with clients or customers over time. You can even use the data to improve your user experience and decrease cart abandonment rate. With customer relationship management integration softwares, you can encourage your customers to follow through with purchases that you know they are interested in.
Here are some popular eCommerce CRM integrations:
- Salesforce
- Zoho
- PipeDrive
- Apptivo
- Hubspot
Social Media Integrations
Showcase your beautifully curated social media feeds on your website. Social media integrations are a great way to show new activity on your Facebook or Instagram feeds with fresh content populating there, making your store look active. Get your customers drooling over your products at the point of purchase with social integrations that show off the lifestyle of your products from these other platforms. Show off user generated content and reviews from social media to help customers make the decision to purchase.
- Flow flow
- Curator.io
- Juicer.io
- Social Streams
So, there you have it. These are the basic integrations you should look at to run any online store. There are plenty of other “nice to haves” but as a starting point, these types of integrations should help get your eCommerce business up and running.
