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Keeping things simple even when ERP integrated ecommerce gets hard!

Written by TNP

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Life is complicated. Too complicated. Choosing a new car is complicated. Navigating public transport is complicated. Online dating is complicated. Co-habiting is complicated. Managing family life is complicated. Accessing NHS services is complicated. Coordinating diaries is complicated. Choosing the best home appliance is complicated. Energy tariffs, school admissions, home renovations...even selecting the best toothbrush is complicated!

When it comes to buying online, why can’t it just be simple?! 

What do I need? What do I want? What’s available? Is it cost-effective? Is it aesthetically pleasing? Is it ethically sourced? Is it sustainably manufactured? Is it simple enough to use without help? Is it supported if I do need help? Is it compatible with all the other stuff I already have? Is it too good to be true and therefore actually just a scam?! 

“We want minimal friction and maximum confidence. This is what brand experience is all about.”

The common ground of shared experience

Whether it's Forrester, Gartner, Google, Forbes, or any other reputed organisation researching and remarking on digital trends, it will come as no surprise that the word on the street is that online buyers are raising the bar. Everybody is looking for a simpler life! We want better service levels and more convenience — but we also care about ethics as well as price points. And business buyer expectations are becoming more and more indistinguishable from that of consumers.  This should come as no surprise, for one simple reason: people are people.  Ultimately, when we humans are buying, we want much the same thing. It doesn't matter whether it's buying fresh fruit and veg, office stationery, an entire new kitchen/factory/business system, or a new toothbrush. We want minimal friction and maximum confidence. This is what brand experience is all about. 

We want life to be simple

Ultimately, we have enough complexity to be dealing with in life, without online purchasing being a headache too. 

When it comes to focusing on simplicity for our customers, we need to be disciplined. It is no surprise, therefore, that simplification is a highly valuable guiding principle for building and optimising successful ecommerce programmes. In fact, in our extensive experience of delivering ERP-integrated ecommerce systems, it’s so pivotal to success that we consider it one of just a few key steps in our simple four-step crib-sheet — something we recommend you always keep with you as a handy travel companion for the journey. 

“...simplification is a highly valuable guiding principle for building and optimising successful ecommerce programmes.”

Four simple steps to success 

Define your goals 
Ensure they are justified in simple terms. Make sure all stakeholders are represented. Clearly state how each affects your customers’ brand experience. Ensure they are measurable. Where possible, start measuring them at once, to benchmark your current position. 

Define the simplest way to achieve them
Minimise complexity by focusing on immediate needs, leaving ideas for the future aside. Strip out anything unnecessary — you can revisit it at a later date. Make sure that everything is framed within the context of achieving your objectives and enhancing your customers' brand experience. 

Implement your initiatives 
Once everyone is agreed that you’re keeping things as simple as possible to make changes that will move you towards your goals, make it happen. 

Monitor your progress 
Keep a close eye on how the changes you’ve implemented impact on your stated goals. After all, the simplest way to check you’re on track is to measure where you’re up to against your goals.

ultimate guide ecommerce SCI graph

Check you’re on track by monitoring progress against goals 

Simplification with SaaS

In light of an appetite for rigorously simplifying processes, Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) was born. The trend towards standardised SaaS deployments is a welcome sign that we do learn from our experience, and we can recognise the value of letting go of bespoke requirements from past projects in favour of streamlining for today.

SaaS vendors have done a great deal to build out feature-rich solutions to support this trend towards standardised software. So, if you’re in the market for a new ecommerce platform, standardising on a SaaS platform is a great place to start. Remember the steps — defining your requirements comes before selecting the platform that will best help you implement them. 

Not everything in life is simple 

ERP-integrated ecommerce is no exception. There tend to be times when we have to work hard out of sight to deal with the necessary complexities, so our customers are spared from bumps in the road. It’s only when they're entirely unaware of how complicated things are under the hood that we've really succeeded. Minimum friction and maximum confidence. 

Simplification can be applied as a guiding principle to weed out the unnecessary complexities — but what do we do about the complexities that we need to tackle in order to give our customers the best experience? 
Well, we whip out our trusty four-step travel companion just the same. And at Step 2, once we’ve established that this is a complexity we genuinely need to overcome right now, we do the hard work of defining how to do so. We ensure our requirement is clearly framed within the context of how it contributes to reaching associated goals and improving our customers’ brand experience. 
Blog - Keeping things simple Simple 4-step crib sheet

Our simple four-step crib-sheet for successful ecommerce 

How hard is a bit of integration anyway? 

As far as necessary complexity goes, ERP-to-ecommerce integration is the biggie. For smaller retail operations, it can be relatively simple. With what we affectionately call ‘the light five’ dataflows, it’s relatively straightforward: 
 
  1. Products and prices set up in the ERP are sent to the webshop 
  2. Stock information from the ERP is regularly updated to the webshop 
  3. Customer data is created by new online shoppers and sent to the ERP 
  4. Orders placed online are sent to the ERP 
  5. Shipment notifications are sent from the ERP to the webshop 
 
But...things can easily escalate into many more interfaces and/or complex nested datasets within the interfaces. Perhaps you need to structure your products differently online to the way they’re configured in your ERP. Maybe you sell some non-stock products that you fulfil by back-to-back ordering and/or drop shipments. Maybe you want POS sales coming in alongside web orders but routed through a different stock management process. Perhaps you offer Click & Collect. With bricks and mortar stores, you likely need bidirectional dataflows for customer data and sales history. And then there’s a suite of datasets for trade customers to support a variety of pricelists, volume discounts, invoice discounts, early payment discounts, control around credit limits...not to mention the combined analytics! 
Blog - Keeping things simple - Integration

Integration doesn’t need to be scary but it’s important not to underestimate it