The difficulty for many companies is in the subtlety of meeting customer expectations across multiple channels. The often-overlooked challenge is integrating the separate yet critical business systems to streamline
Here are three steps to help integrate QuickBooks and ecommerce to “bake” the perfect
1. Have the Right Ingredients: Choose an Up-to-Date, Full-Featured Ecommerce Solution
Your ecommerce choice is one of the most important decisions you’ll make regarding your ecommerce strategy. Going with the most convenient choice (due to partnerships or pre-built links to existing systems) isn’t always the best route to take. Your online store needs to be easy to use, intuitive, and provide all the customer service benefits shoppers would expect while shopping in a brick-and-mortar store.
So pick your ecommerce provider wisely. Choose an experienced ecommerce solution provider like Magento or Shopify that can provide a feature-rich system giving you the flexibility and control over the look, content, and functionality of your ecommerce store. It should address both customer expectations and your selling requirements.
Customer expectations:
- Simple navigation and robust search capabilities
- Product availability online and in stores
- Competitive pricing with the ability to use coupons or loyalty cards
- Flexible payment options
- Easy and fast delivery or ship-to-store
- Flexible returns in stores and online
- Personalized customer service
Seller requirements:
- SEO to “get found”
- Support upselling and cross-selling opportunities
- Powerful marketing and promotions
- Flexible design to provide a great customer experience
- Regular enhancements to keep up with evolving expectations
- Plug-ins or add-ons to connect to other systems
2. Spice It Up: Expand Your Reach by Selling on Amazon and eBay
The biggest benefit to selling on Amazon and eBay is the exposure. Each site receives millions of visitors daily. In 2011, Amazon remained the largest online retailer globally with more than 280 million unique visitors in one month and capturing 20% of all online retail market share. Amazon’s reported revenue for 2012 was $62 billion. Coming in second place, eBay captured 16% of online retail market share, with reported revenues in 2012 at $14 billion. Amazon’s success is largely attributed to its massive inventory, reported at 180 million products in 2012 – enough to fill 1,290 Walmart Supercenters.
A big part of this growing inventory comes from third-party sellers – companies that sell their products on Amazon’s website. The Wall Street Journal reports that sellers can experience an average 50% increase in sales when they join and start selling on Amazon Marketplace. With a slightly smaller inventory, eBay is known for being a hassle-free, turnkey selling marketplace, open for business to even the smallest and least-experienced sellers.
3. Mix Well: Streamline Operations by Integrating QuickBooks and Your Ecommerce System
Finding new buyers and selling to them leads to great revenue growth, yet companies wonder why their margins aren’t keeping pace. The culprit is often the manual labor required to manage separate systems.
Integrating QuickBooks with your ecommerce site provides enormous cost savings and allows you to have more control in the following areas:
- Automating online item listings and pricing
- Posting sales data from ecommerce channels
- Collecting orders, splitting, and routing them as necessary for fulfillment
- Synchronizing inventory counts with the ecommerce system
- Gathering customer data
- Automating receipt and shipping notifications
Integration not only reduces manual processes, saving time and money, it also gives you improved visibility across the entire order-to-cash process, allowing you to identify issues easier and address them before they affect customer satisfaction or the bottom line.
Hopefully by now, integrating QuickBooks and your ecommerce systems seems like a great idea, but imagine the benefits that could be achieved if you integrated your point of sale (POS) and enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems as well. The most successful online sellers today integrate all of their business systems to create seamless business workflows, while increasing the accuracy and timeliness of information as it flows throughout their organization and saving countless hours of manual labor. More importantly, data sharing enables better customer service:
Customer service benefits:
- Consistent shopping experience across multiple sales channels
- Proactive order status updates
- Faster delivery
- More accurate responses to inquiries
- Access to complete order history – regardless of where orders were generated
- Lower prices with controlled margins
- Better-executed sales and promotions
Whether ecommerce is new to you, or if it’s something your company has done for years, it’s worth taking the time to follow these steps to see if you’ve baked your strategy well enough to take full advantage of your QuickBooks system and to maximize the return on your ecommerce investment.