eCommerce POS Integration: Why Integrate Your Systems

Running a successful multichannel business takes many hours of hard work and a dedicated team of employees. There are a variety of factors that go into maintaining brick and mortar and eCommerce operations. When it’s going well, it’s hard to change things up.

But even for successful businesses, there are ways to improve operations, increase sales, and improve customer satisfaction. Through integration of your eCommerce and point-of-sale (POS) systems in store, your business can reach higher goals with ease.

Why Integrate Your eCommerce and POS Systems?

Integrating your eCommerce platform with your POS systems can seem daunting because of costs or risk of business disruption caused by the need to change existing systems. However, you’ll see that it becomes worth it when you consider the impact it has on your operations and customer experience.

Right now, you probably work out of both systems. When not integrated, your team is responsible for manually moving data between them. Employees hand-key data such as:

• Product data from POS to your eCommerce channels
• Sales orders from eCommerce to POS
• Decimating inventory levels after sales
• Shipping information and tracking status from POS to eCommerce channels

When these processes aren’t automated, mistakes happen. Shipping addresses are entered wrong. Inventory isn’t updated fast enough causing you to oversell. Product information could be incomplete, incorrect, or missing.

And, all these manual processes take time. It can take whole teams hours and hours to make sure all the data is transferred and accurate. This is time taken away from something more important – your customers.

When you don’t integrate your eCommerce and POS systems, it’s really your customer experience that is at stake. They won’t see accurate product data, will experience slow shipping times, and will see wrong inventory levels.

Benefits of eCommerce and POS Integration

eCommerce and POS integration, on the other hand, leads to benefits like these:

• Eliminate manual entry of data to save time, while reducing errors.
• Provide accurate inventory levels to avoid overselling
• Automatically notify customers when orders have shipped
• Allow customers to pick up online orders in store
• Share online customer data between online store and POS
• Be flexible enough to add more sales channels and handle the growth

There’s nothing new about the stiff competition that retailers face. What has changed is the source of the challenges as new technologies arise and customer preferences evolve along with them. The first step in staying ahead of the growing challenges in the retail business is to find technology partners who listen to your company’s concerns, and who respond with solutions that are tailored to the business’s needs and goals.