When to consider integration

A sharp rise in turnover is one sign that integration may be your next smart business decision. Below are a few other scenarios that should prompt you to consider it.

You’ve started an online business and things are going pretty well. After some trial and error, you’ve established a solid supply chain from factory through to fulfillment, and volumes are finally starting to pick up. There’s just one problem – it’s all rather a lot of work! Is it time to consider systems integration? If one or more of the following scenarios apply to you, the answer may be yes.

Human error

Manually capturing online orders in your accounting system is not only painful, it’s also prone to mistakes. This is especially true when dealing with dozens of orders a day. If only there was a way to automatically sync your web orders into your ERP. (spoiler alert, there is!)

Taking your physical shop online

If you run a physical retail shop and decide to sell your stock online as well, you will then have two sales channels. If someone walks into your shop and buys a product, it’s important that your online channel knows about the sale and that the stock availability is reduced accordingly. Are you going to manually adjust the stock levels on your website each time your physical shop makes a sale? I didn’t think so. The smart move would be to sync both channels to one source of truth – your accounting system – to ensure you don’t oversell.

Wholesale

Your accounting system is the brains of your wholesale business. It determines a customer’s pricing tier, discount structure, warehouse allocation and account terms. An online B2B trade store should be able to present this information to each wholesale customer and let your ERP decide whether to accept their order or not. This is simply not possible without integration.

3rd party warehousing

If you don’t have the space to store your stock or the manpower to manage it, a 3rd party warehousing solution might be your answer. Services like ParcelNinja will hold your stock and handle the picking, packing and delivery when they receive instructions to do so. Stock2Shop can help you send those instructions automatically each time your website receives a paid order.

Marketplace

Marketplaces like Takealot and Leroy Merlin need to know how much stock you have for them to sell, and they get very grumpy if you are unable to provide them with products that you said were available. If you want to avoid penalties or possibly being blacklisted, you could set some stock aside in your warehouse especially for these marketplaces… or you could automatically feed them a stock quantity update directly from your ERP.

When you are selling your products through many different channels, whether they be retail ecommerce sites, B2B trade stores, marketplaces or even physical shops, it’s important that they all know how much stock you have and are selling at the correct price. The best way to do this is to sync them all up to a central database, your ERP. We can help with that. In many cases we can help you sync your online orders into your accounting system too.