Why ERP Integration Is 'Make or Break' for B2B eCommerce

Do you sell B2B? Are you considering expanding into eCommerce? Hold up! Before you decide on your eCommerce platform, make sure you’re choosing a solution that provides 100% ERP + eCommerce integration. Here’s why that matters.

For B2B operations, automatic and fail-proof ERP + eCommerce integration can be the difference between a successful online sales platform with loyal customers… or a total and complete business flop.

Here are three reasons why:

1. eCommerce Doesn’t Actually Do Much on Its Own

Here’s a secret most eCommerce platform salespeople don’t want you to know: Like rookie employees, most eCommerce solutions don’t know anything about your business when you onboard them. As with new staffers, you must take the time to train your eCommerce tool to understand your business… and in the tech world, that means the wrong eCommerce platform will require you to do a lot of painstaking data entry.

eCommerce platforms are great for attractively displaying your products online and giving you that critical web presence you need these days, but where do you think your eCommerce tool will get product data from?

If you’re lucky, your solution will get data directly from your Sage 100 ERP using Perfect Sync technology for 100% accurate, automatic, fail-proof, bi-directional syncing with auto-detection of data changes. However, if you choose the wrong eCommerce solution, you and your staff will be responsible for feeding it all of its required data every day, including constant inventory updates.

2. ERP + eCommerce Integration Can Increase Sales

One of the most important exercises you can do when considering a new B2B eCommerce solution is to consider how it’ll serve your customers. Of course you want it to work seamlessly for you (more on that in a minute), but your goal should be to select an eCommerce solution that your customers love using.

After all, if your customers love using your eCommerce tool, they’ll enjoy buying more products from you.

Not sure how to get your clients to love your eCommerce platform? Here’s a tip: For years, eCommerce industry experts have supported personalization as a great way to deliver value to customers. The problem, however, is that traditional eCommerce personalization requires a lot of data collection, which customers don’t like.

Many eCommerce platform salespeople will try to sell you on the most costly solutions that collect disturbing amounts of data meant to help B2C sellers with one-off sales, but your B2B operations don’t need a costly B2C-centric tool with data-collection bells and whistles.

As a B2B seller, you already know who your customers are and you know what they want. In fact, all the relevant data you need for B2B personalization is currently in your ERP. Right now.

A good ERP-integrated eCommerce solution will sync that data between your Sage 100 ERP and your eCommerce tool, so you can easily provide great personalization that delights your customers.

Here’s just a small sampling of the data that ERP-integrated eCommerce can deliver:

• Order history
• Invoice history
• Customer-specific pricing data
• Inventory updates
• Customer data
• A/R processing
• RMA initiation
• Related products

With ERP integration for your B2B eCommerce tool, you’ll easily be able to harness this data to improve customer satisfaction and drive a 100% self-service 24/7 online sales platform.

3. Effective ERP Integration Streamlines Your Business Processes

Most B2B sellers find that when they provide up-to-date data and improve their sales, their business naturally grows. Often, this growth happens fast.

Since you’re a business leader considering the purchase of a B2B eCommerce platform, we’re going to guess that this "ain’t your first rodeo." You’ve seen firsthand what happens when your business grows rapidly: you struggle to keep up.

Luckily, ERP-integrated eCommerce helps you stay on top of even the fastest growth.

With a system that delivers 100% accurate ERP + eCommerce integration, you can increase sales without increasing headcount because the right eCommerce tool doesn’t require you to rekey data. That means you can avoid the inevitable errors that arise from manual data entry.

In fact, some of today’s best eCommerce platforms (like CIMcloud) reduce even more data entry for you. Because they seamlessly integrate with the leading shipping providers, they empower you to flow data from your eCommerce solution over to your shipping portal with ease. (But that’s only the beginning of your integration options with CIMcloud – check out what else you can integrate with the powerful B2B eCommerce platform!)

Make Your B2B eCommerce Sales a Success with CIMcloud

As the B2B eCommerce solution with the hands-down, best integration for Sage 100, CIMcloud provides full data integration between your ERP, your eCommerce platform, your CRM, and a wide range of third-party services and solutions. Many CIMcloud customers use their eCommerce platform to integrate data with shipping providers, payment processors, and sales tax calculation engines, so they can get more done every day and every hour.

CIMcloud’s 100% accurate, up-to-date data syncing for business tools helps your business work faster, smarter, and more efficiently, so you can sell more, grow more, and do more -- effortlessly.

That’s the kind of capability that can “make or break” your eCommerce success.