Well, it’s a pain to choose the best eCommerce integration platform for your business. First of all, you can find hundreds of solutions across the globe. However it’s difficult on how to begin with. The first step is to see if you require a hosted/licensed application. Hosted solutions, likewise, offer lower costs with minimal IT needs, less maintenance and you can easily upscale or downscale based on your business needs. In the case of licensed solutions, you will be able to build a custom product dedicated for your marketplace. Also, maintenance costs are higher compared to the counterparts and you might consider keeping a capital investment in advance to take it forward.
As a result, here we are with a Blog Series on how to choose the Best eCommerce Integration for your Marketplace!
Once you have planned on the type of deployment for your marketplace, deep dive into the features. Top notch eCommerce solutions can offer your custom site templates, SEO, integrated shopping carts, product catalogs, email marketing solution, inventory management solution and basic analytical tools. In this century, we are in need for mobile commerce platforms and rewards management, so you can withstand the competition from others. Product suggestions, wishlist, product as a gift services will keep your customers happy for the reason that wanting them to visit your marketplace again and again.
The “top-notch” eCommerce Platforms
Magento
There’s plenty of top-notch eCommerce platforms available in the market today. Consequently, Magento has been the leader since 2011 with its great growth and reports. However, with more players in the market, the market share has gone down to 4.48% (Courtesy: www.datanyze.com)
Magento is still a favorite for large organizations due to its flexibility. It also has a Magento has a dedicated team to keep pace with the market releasing latest updates and top ongoing support services.
As mentioned earlier, Magento comes with lot of flexible implementation features. You can go with licensed, hosted or even an open source platform. The features that’s available on Magento are:
Great search features with flexible navigation elements
Custom UI designs (landing pages, product catalog and multi-store support)
Dedicated App Store for marketplace enhancements
Dedicated SEO engine
Loaded with Marketing tools like gift cards, rewards programs, promo banners etc.)
Customer Engagement Features like wish lists, product suggestions, customer assisted shopping experience.
WooCommerce
To be exact, over 780,000 merchants use WooCommerce. WooCommerce is an open source e-commerce plugin for WordPress. It is designed for small to large-sized online merchants using WordPress. Launched on September 27, 2011, the plugin quickly became popular for its simplicity to install and customize and free base product. Since Automattic’s acquisition, WooCommerce has kept gaining market share and has now become one of the leading E-commerce platforms on the Internet. The Market Share for WooCommerce recorded is 24.4%.
Shopify
Shopify is an “all in one” ecommerce platform that allows user to build an online store with a great user experience.
In order to build an online store, users get a 14-day free trial. Since Shopify is based on the subscription business model, the monthly price after the trial period starts from $29 up to $299 for standard shops. Similarly, for enterprise business, users can go with Shopify Plus package. It has over 270,000 merchants as of August 2018.
Data as of August 2018 (Courtesy: Datanyze.com)
Integrating your Marketplace with RMH and Dynamics GP
With top-notch eCommerce Marketplaces as mentioned above, due to the reason that you need to be able to integrate it with your leading ERP suites like Retail Management Hero (RMH) or Microsoft Dynamics GP, the experience is going to be even better! You get a combine value of two products without any hassle!
Why you need to integrate your Marketplace with your ERP? Reason is very obvious! You need to get rid of manual interventions that kills time and error-prone too. In online businesses, order errors are expensive and chances of losing money is higher. Incorrect pricing, inventory levels, shipping address errors, good heavens, can’t even think about such situations as it’s going to be a disaster!
Therefore, how can you integrate some of the ERP-eCommerce processes to make your lives easier?
Centralized area for syncing item catalog information
Real-time inventory to all your sales channels
Standard order to cash procedure across all your sales channels
Moving your order information under one location for boosting customer satisfaction.
Above all, if you are able to achieve the above levels of integration, you are going to save lots of time and boost customer satisfaction in no time!
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