In today's highly competitive eCommerce world, SaaS software suppliers and developers are bound to establish robust connections between their systems and modern shopping carts such as Magento, Shopify, Wix, or WooCommerce. Unfortunately, the software integration with shopping platforms is probably one of the most challenging tasks for each B2B eCommerce provider.
The absence of such connection becomes almost impossible for the software, which provides shipping management, warehouse, orders and inventory, etc., to proper access the data of their clients’ online stores. It is because such systems needs different customer, orders and products data from online stores to perform key functions.
In this article, we want to go deeper into the concept of software integration and show you how to create solid and reliable connections with today's most popular eCommerce platforms.
What is Software Integration?
Software integration is a complex process, but it can be simplified by enabling the creation of a connection between the two systems. For example, we can discuss integration between software and eCommerce platforms such as Shopify or WooCommerce. This integration is mandatory to allow the software solution to perform its functions and operations.
Software integration is designed to automate day-to-day tasks and ensure that your team does not spend all day moving data between systems, creating reports, and updating data tables. Good integration eliminates manual work, which only hinders development. After that, you can focus on more critical tasks for your business, such as finding new partners, getting into new markets, or joining new business verticals.
Experts agree that integration is the future of retail technologies. Thus, platforms and tools available for dynamic updates will soon become a new standard. Software integration is usually done through APIs (Application Programming Interfaces). We will discuss this in more detail in the next section. But first, let us examine some specific integrations for modern B2B software developers:
Inventory management: effective inventory management is a priority for millions of online sellers. The system allows them to monitor the goods and their number and display info in real-time. Inventory software vendors that integrate eCommerce platforms can easily see how much inventory is "laying dead", accurately identify actual inventory by different channels, and then automatically update the inventory based on invoices. It is software that must run smoothly and with many shopping platforms to meet your customers’ needs.
Shipping automation: Companies that develop shipping automation software need to integrate their solutions with well-known shopping platforms to be able to maintain logistics transparency, manage order packaging, and process returns more efficiently than ever before.
The Specifics of Integration with eCommerce Platforms
Why should you integrate your software with different eCommerce platforms? First, you can significantly expand your customer base. Connecting your business to just a few platforms, such as Shopify, WooCommerce, or Magento, gives you access to millions of online sellers who use them to sell their products and do business.
The second reason is that software integration allows your solution to access all the data you need to perform your services. This data contains info about products, orders, taxes, shipping, inventory and customers, etc. You can use such data to provide better services for your target niche.
Third, you can expand the range of services provided. The data you can collect from the connected platforms can help your solution provide new features and better services to meet your customers' needs.
Last but not least, connecting your business to eCommerce platforms will increase your company’s profits, as more customers will automatically mean more important business, more excitement, and higher profits.
Using the API is the best way for integration. This set of coding rules and processes allows your solution to connect seamlessly to the shopping carts and marketplaces, providing access to the data stored in it. Since each eCommerce platform has its own unique API, developing a connection to multiple platforms requires different coding skills.
At this stage, it is crucial to understand that there are difficulties that usually accompany the integration process manually. Although, as mentioned above, you need to find developers with a variety of skills that know how to perform individual integrations that meet the needs of each unique API, you also need to finance thousands of dollars in each integration, as well as thousands more for ongoing service. Add to this the fact that some APIs have their own bugs and problems, and they are quite prone to cyber-attacks and data theft, and soon you will realize that software integration is best implemented with the help of a third-party tool.
How to Develop a Software Integration with eCommerce Platforms?
You can try a manual approach, which includes searching for the right developers for work, hiring them, carrying out adaptation, and training development exactly for your unique functions. Even after successful integration, you should make sure that you continue paying them for support and upgrades for each connection separately. Or there is a simpler and more convenient option — you can use a third-party integration tool. The last option involves hiring a team of experts who have already developed their unique integration tool and can easily connect you to some shopping carts at once. The cost of using this service is much lower than using manual integration with several platforms.
A third-party integration solution works by connecting eCommerce software and apps to more than 40 shopping platforms and marketplaces. These include industry leaders like Amazon, Wix, Magento, Shopify, PrestaShop and other platforms. You can use its unified API to integrate your SaaS software with a host of eCommerce platforms, and then use different API methods to access exactly the data you need.
With such an integration solution, you have over 100 methods to manage orders, products, categories, shipments, or customer data. During the trial, you can analyze all the features to determine whether such a solution is the right option for your B2B eCommerce business.
If you want to learn more about how a third-party integration solution can help you implement eCommerce software integration, please do not hesitate to contact us.
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