Rethink Your Business Systems With E-Commerce

With the easing of the lockdowns and the economy in recovering mode, e-commerce has become increasingly important as many companies have been forced to completely revamp their online presence to adapt and foster direct relationships with their customers during this unprecedented time. 

However, the front-end e-commerce site is not the only area that businesses need to address. Dissociating the back-end systems such as finance, order and inventory management systems while operating an e-commerce site can increase inefficiency. Manually entering data from online orders or batch importing can cause delays and errors. These order and inventory issues create dissatisfied shopping experiences such as shipping delays or items being out of stock, which subsequently lead to lower conversion and retention rates.

Some businesses attempt to bridge these disconnected systems by relying on third-party tools to process data exchanges. It’s often unreliable and requires ongoing fees and maintenance for such as integrations, add-on applications, extensions and payment gateways. These factors can reduce productivity and increase inefficiencies.

Here are some common aspects of e-commerce challenges:

Engaging Experiences

In order to attract new visitors and convert website traffic into sales, businesses need to deliver relevant and engaging shopping experiences. Getting first-time purchasers to make their second purchase requires businesses to provide value beyond the initial transaction.

Although gaining new customers is important, growing customer loyalty and lifetime value are also crucial to the long-term health of a business. Businesses need to drive shoppers back to their website, by not only relying on the quality of products but also finding ways to increase average order values and frequency of purchase.

Inventory Insights

Providing a positive online shopping experience without considering whether inventory is available to ship can impact on shopping experiences that affects the brand value and trust. Not being able to display stock availability on your website, shoppers will not be able to make informed purchasing decisions. Furthermore, without these insights, inventory managers won’t be able to make distribution adjustments to maintain inventory level which can result in lost sales. While at the same time, when businesses overstock popular products to keep up with demand, they will hurt their cash flow and risk being stuck with excess inventory.

Order Management

A company without a single platform to manage all orders coming from various channels will face a challenge to fulfil orders in an effective and efficient manner. The delay in processing and shipping out the orders will impact on the customer satisfaction level, especially if the customer can quickly shift to different brands or sellers. Additionally, customers mostly will not tolerate any order inaccuracy. Therefore, it is important to provide them with the best shopping experience to retain their loyalty to your brand.

An order management system unified with e-commerce, inventory and finance can increase customer satisfaction, decrease labour and shipping costs and increase profit margins.

Unifying E-commerce with Your Business Systems

It’s difficult to get a full understanding of your customers’ interactions and behaviour when your customer, order, inventory and financial data are stored in separate, channel-specific silos. The manual works to replicate data sources of orders, product information and pricing in your e-commerce solution and business systems are ineffective and can cause errors.

When e-commerce is unified with ERP, CRM, order and inventory management, businesses will be able to gain real-time visibility into every aspect of their business. Integration between front-end e-commerce system and back-end business systems are no longer needed. All systems will work seamlessly together and, organisations do not need to manage separate systems and key in data manually

Oracle NetSuite SuiteCommerce

Oracle NetSuite’s e-commerce solution, SuiteCommerce, is natively unified with NetSuite business applications, enabling companies to manage their entire business with a single solution. It provides a single source of customer, order and inventory data providing unprecedented, real-time visibility across organisation to make informed timely business decisions.

SuiteCommerce also has access to any data or field stored in Oracle NetSuite back office in real-time and provides a complete view of your customers’ activity and experiences. By housing operations under one unified system, organisations see a lower total cost of ownership than other disparate solutions.