SMEs demand integration between eCommerce websites and back-end systems

At the big end of town, there’s nothing remotely new or sexy about systems integration.

For big business, systems integration has been around since the web was still a sparkle in the eye of its founders. And they can afford to employ teams of people to ensure that this costly data duplication is kept to an absolute minimum.

Not so the smaller business operator whose websites generally start with being a competitive grudge purchase, move to being a valuable promotional tool before realising that it is a fundamental operational component of running a business.

In fact, it’s really only recently that they realised that their admin people and/or time were taking up much of their resources in simply duplicating, cutting and pasting or re-keying information that really shouldn’t require it.

Keeping data duplication to the absolute minimum

So what is this thing called systems integration?

As we have hinted above, it’s really the ‘bolting together’ of two or more systems so that customer, financial or other data flows seamlessly from one to the other and back again.

For example, a central customer database that provides customer data for both email broadcast and bookkeeping systems. Or a point of sale system that also populates an eCommerce website and in turn a bookkeeping system.

Systems integration can sometime be expensive and time consuming to establish, but its an investment worth considering as data is entered only once within an organisation instead of the multiple touch points that can cost a fortune in administrative labour.

SMEs catch on

Now in this year of online retailing, the attention of smaller business operators is turning to not only establishing eCommerce websites but ensuring that online sales data moves seamlessly into existing point of sale, inventory and financial systems.

So much so that this requirement has made up nearly two thirds of the recent enquiries within my own web services business.

Before we go on, it’s important to understand that there are four key types of data integration a smaller business operator should be aware of.

1. Zero integration: If you ever have to either re-key or cut and paste digital information from one system to another, you have zero integration. These days re-keying data from a written or faxed order or other document is a blight on your resources. It’s important to eradicate this massive time waster as quickly as possible.

2. Manual integration: Manual integration refers to what is essentially a transfer of data from one system to another. It occurs by extracting data from the source system, usually by way of a CSV (comma separated text) file and then importing it into the recipient system. Good ‘recipient’ systems will then prompt you to match up any inconsistent fields so that data moves into the correct component of the recipient system.

While this approach is quite workable for small amounts of data, it soon gets found out when the amount of data (for example orders) increases.

3. Scheduled integration: As the name suggests, schedule integration occurs at pre-determined times. So for example, the integration of data may occur at the end of every day so that the next working day all data is up-to-date.

While this method is not as reliable as real-time data, it can be considerably more affordable than real-time integration.

4. Real-time integration: This is the holy grail of integration. Real-time data transfer which means that all systems are constantly up-to-date and reducing the chances of errors caused by the delay in non real-time data transfer.

For example, an eCommerce website that does not ‘port’ into its inventory system in real time may accept an order from a customer only to find that it is out of stock, meaning an order that may be either delayed or worse still, unable to be fulfilled at all.

Such an episode will result in an unhappy customer who is likely to tell others of their bad experience.

The workaround

But smaller business operators shouldn’t panic or delay their online presence if they can’t achieve real-time integration immediately.

What’s more important is that the eCommerce system they do buy is able to ‘scale up’ to incorporating systems integration at a later time, taking advantage of natural price decreases as integration technology decreases in cost over time.