ERP Integration: Digital Commerce Powered by Your ERP

10 November 2020

By choosing an ERP-integrated e-commerce solution, you eliminate literally all of your data entry problems.

ERP integration automates all of the routine business processes that involve copying and transmitting data. It sends product, price, customer, order, and invoice data back and forth between your web store and your ERP, getting everything done in a fraction of the time while eliminating the possibility of human error.

Say, for instance, you start selling on products online, and you have to enter every new order manually into your ERP. Depending on the length and complexity of the order, each one could take several minutes or more.

This could prove difficult even with normal web traffic. With the Holiday season, you might not be able to keep up. It’s actually a very common situation with e-commerce. Because a web store is able to accept orders 24 hours a day from around the globe, even a moderate spike in traffic result in a large influx of orders.

With the e-commerce platform functioning as an isolated system, all these orders need to be manually copied over to the business’s ERP or accounting software and sent on from there for fulfillment. The order then needs to be invoiced, and the invoice copied back over to the web store. Inventory has to be adjusted in both systems, and occasionally customer information as well.

The more new customers and orders your business receives, the more time and resource-intensive this process becomes, and the more prone your system is to error. Ironically, this can turn success into a liability, since high-traffic sites can get hundreds, even thousands of orders per day.

But with an ERP-integrated e-commerce solution, the whole game changes. Why reinvent the wheel? Leverage your ERP and make it sell for you.

The same automation extends to customer management. If you are running a non-integrated solution, you have to copy new customer data over to your ERP. With an integrated solution like k-eCommerce, all this information transfers back and forth automatically between your web store and your ERP, keeping both systems up-to-date and accurate and eliminating the possibility of human error.

This means that even small companies can get an online channel up and running smoothly without placing any additional burdens on their staff or having to hire new people. In fact, smaller companies and start-ups are innovating, meeting consumer trends, and responding to an increasing demand for online channels that more well-established companies with longer development cycles are missing.

This, in turn, is allowing them to claim a growing portion of the market share. As an example, in the specialty food and beverage sector, e-commerce accounts for 36% of all sales in both direct-to-consumer and B2B markets.

In short, an ERP-integrated e-commerce platform will save you an incredible amount of time and money, allowing you to focus on growing your business.