As we know, eCommerce relies on a tightly-integrated customer experience across each of your company’s assets. In today's modern technology era, we need to pay attention to both the quality of our products, the emotions of our customers, and the convenience customers have when shopping for our products. In particular, Customers should be able to have the exact same shopping experience regardless of where they purchase, despite being through your website, your mobile app, or your brick-and-mortar store. Since then, Idealpos - a trendy integration between your eCommerce and POS partners, has emerged as a perfect payment solution for both sellers and buyers.
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:
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.
eCommerce and POS integration, on the other hand, leads to benefits like these:
Realizing the need to ingrate your systems is just the first step in bettering your business. Next, you’ll have to choose how you want to integrate. As you probably guessed, there are a few different ways to connect your POS and eCommerce systems.
When updates are made to an eCommerce product catalog, employees usually need to go in and manually update product details at brick-and-mortar stores. As a result of having a centralized product information management (PIM) system that is included with your eCommerce platform - store associates can accurately answer product related questions, create orders in-person and place online orders for any product not in stock at the store. The customer experience takes on an important new dimension when store associates have more tools and more information at their disposal and those tools require no in-store management in order to be effective.
Along those same lines, linking the eCommerce/POS system helps guarantee that inventory levels stay accurate across all transactions. Employees can find information in real time on inventory status and product availability across any of the retailer’s locations. And like product details, changes are applied automatically—meaning no more bookkeeping or invoicing surprises when employees forget to deduct product from your master inventory list.
Don’t underestimate the impact these customer experience boosts can have to your company. Research by Forrester showed that customer experience leaders in retail grow revenue faster than laggards. Of course, to unlock the benefits for yourself, you’ll need to make sure the two systems are integrated correctly.
At its most basic, “integration” just means finding a way for two service providers to communicate to provide a solution that will work with your business model, in this case, your POS system and your eCommerce platform proper. As such, the integration conversation begins with the eCommerce partners supplying your platform.
Typically, there are several scenarios for deploying a POS system and integrating it into an existing eCommerce platform:
The POS will feature a unique interface for running product search, order creation and customer account lookup - designed with an emphasis on speed and quick access.
The integration between both systems requires that both the eCommerce platform and the POS can make data available and incorporate data from another system in an effective way.
Idealpos is rated as the most comprehensive type of integration. Idealpos involves working with your eCommerce and POS partners, thereby developing custom code that allows the two systems coordinate.