Running an online store requires you to constantly stay on top of all things at the same time and tackle all the logistical, technical, financial and promotional challenges that will regularly crop up.
This is where you need solutions to streamline and optimize your online store with the best eCommerce integrations available. With a stack of vital applications and integrations, your eCommerce store can cut down on time spent on troubleshooting issues and putting out fires, and use the time to focus on growth.
In this blog, we will list out the best eCommerce integrations that can help you streamline your online store and ensure all the systems are aligned and optimized towards improved performance. Before we begin, let us have a look at some of the benefits of having the best eCommerce integrations for your eCommerce store.
What are the benefits of having the best eCommerce integrations?
Having eCommerce integrations is like having connectors to link your online store’s different aspects for much more functional, streamlined and optimized operations.
With the best eCommerce integrations 2024 has to offer, you can easily synchronize different tools that you use to create smooth user experiences for customers and reduce errors when handling multiple systems simultaneously. Most of the top integrations for online stores also provide you with an easier way to understand how well your eCommerce store is performing or functioning by gathering accurate insights on the same.
With the best eCommerce integrations in place, you can free up your team to focus on more pressing issues by automating key day-to-day processes. This way, eCommerce integrations can contribute to better productivity while eliminating the need for persistent human involvement or oversight.
11 best integrations for your online store
These are some of the best and most essential eCommerce integrations that you should definitely consider for your online store.
Payment gateways
Offering a seamless front-end experience to your customers can only be achieved by integrating a secure and fast payment gateway into your online store. A good payment gateway should not only perform transactions with efficiency and security but also allow various payment options for the customers, such as Visa, PayPal, Mastercard, Klarna etc.
Businesses can also integrate redirect payment processors to send the customers to the payment processor’s website to complete the payment, and then redirect them back to the store. For more control over the payment experience, it is ideal to have an on-site payment gateway where customers can directly complete the transaction from your server.
Website Builders
How and where you build your website can have a huge impact on how it performs, and hence choosing a competent system to build your website on should be one of your first priorities. It is also important to note that the choice of website builder will be the deciding factor on what integrations you can use for your store.
A website builder arms you with a suite of tools for building the ideal website. Some examples include Wix and Squarespace. There are also website builders that are simultaneously eCommerce platforms, providing users with many eCommerce features and functions to sell products/services online. This includes platforms such as Shopify, WooCommerce and BigCommerce.
When looking for website builders, choose the one that offers integrations with other major eCommerce tools to help run operations cohesively and consistently.
SMS marketing tool
SMS is a powerful way to reach customers, as more customers prefer shopping from their phones. Text messages have a significantly high open rate and this makes integrating it with your email marketing efforts a necessary and strategic step. SMS marketing allows you to communicate with customers instantly with promotions, updates, and personalized messages.
A good SMS marketing tool such as TxtCart can have a resounding impact on the customer experience by enabling smoother and proactive communication while helping you manage your campaigns, segment your audience, and track performance. Additionally, by enabling two-way conversational SMS with a tool like TxtCart, you can significantly reduce your cart recovery rate while witnessing better ROI.
Social media integration
Being on social media means being where your potential customers are. With a social media management tool, you can direct your social media marketing to drive traffic, engage customers and increase sales.
There are several social media tools that can assist you in the management of your profiles, the execution of specific campaigns, ensuring consistent brand personality across interactions, automating communications, and the measurement of your results across different platforms.
A good social media management tool will also allow you to integrate the social media engagement data with an analytics tool to provide a better overall insight into the impact of your social media efforts on your store traffic. Some popular choices include Hootsuite, Zapier and Buffer.
Review tool
Most customers are motivated to purchase or to not purchase a product based on the experiences and opinions of other consumers. Customer reviews are a very important factor that helps in establishing trust and credibility in the online store.
A good review tool can gather the customer’s feedback as product reviews, ratings and surveys and promote these reviews to increase the store’s popularity and improve its public perception. There are many options such as Stampede.io, Feefo and Yotpo, for online stores to seamlessly gather customer reviews.
Email marketing solution
As more than four million people use email, it is an effective communication channel for everything from marketing messages to order confirmations. By adding email integrations to your online store, you can collect email addresses from store visitors, send follow-ups to them, incentivize interactions and nurture them into loyal customers.
Email marketing integrations can also help you segment the audience and share targeted emails for the best impact. A few good email marketing programs include Klaviyo, Constant Contact and MailChimp.
Analytics tool
Analytics tools easily fall under the must-have eCommerce integrations, due to how integral they are for eCommerce businesses to meaningfully direct themselves towards success.
Informed decision-making is the right way to grow a brand and the right analytics tool integration will help you gain valuable information about the customers, sales, and the effectiveness of your marketing strategies to make data-driven and impactful decisions. Online stores usually use analytic tools like Google Analytics, Adobe Analytics, Mixpanel and Hotjar to gain insights into their business performance.
Inventory management
Tracking orders, managing inventory and ensuring product availability, are required to fully deliver on the promises you make to your customers as a responsible and reliable eCommerce brand. Tracking all the orders and managing inventory in one place can be an effective way to improve efficiency and provide customers with realistic insight into what’s available in stock.
Implementing an inventory management system means that there is an ability to have real-time product information and data sharing across the stores or systems. It enables you to monitor the sales, stock and best-selling products, thus avoiding situations where you lose customers, by maintaining a balance of supply and demand.
TradeGecko, Zoho Inventory and DEAR Systems are a few good inventory management tools that can be considered for eCommerce stores.
Customer support tool
Better customer support results in improved retention and any eCommerce business owner would recognize that retention is more valuable than acquisition in the long term. Selecting the appropriate customer support tool will assist you in dealing with the received inquiries, solving the problems, and offering the clients proper support in various channels.
Customers can be engaged through different platforms and mediums such as live chat, help desk, chatbots and call centres, and ensure that all these are integrated with your eCommerce platform to provide a consistently high-quality customer support experience. Support chatbots are a great option to scale support by automating frequent questions and responses.
A few good customer support tools to consider include Zendesk, Gorgias and Freshdesk.
CRM system
A Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system is essential for managing your interactions with current and potential customers. CRM systems are built to assist you in tracking customer interactions, collect customer data and provide customer insights that can help you build stronger customer relationships.
Integrating a CRM system with your analytics tool, marketing tools and ordering systems can provide you with a comprehensive view of customer demographics, behaviours and patterns as well as other numbers like average order value and more. Some commonly used CRM tools are Zoho CRM, HubSpot and SalesForce.
Shipping and fulfillment software
Customers expect eCommerce stores to deliver their purchases safely and swiftly with no hiccups on the way. Shipping and fulfillment integrations can allow you to meet these expectations while reducing the tedium of the shipping process. You don’t have to worry about tracking shipments, printing packing slips and labels, comparing shipping rates etc.
Choosing the right software can help make your business more efficient, decrease the number of manual errors, and improve customer shopping experience.
Amazon FBA, FedEx Fulfillment and Shippo are some of the few popular shipping and fulfillment integration choices to consider.
Run your eCommerce store better with the right integrations
With the right eCommerce integrations in place your eCommerce store can be run much more efficiently while reducing the effort needed. Using integrations between different software allows you to easily automate tasks and processes, streamline your workflows, scale your business to a wider audience, and achieve much more.
With the best eCommerce integrations create a cohesive customer experience that consistently delivers at every stage of their journey with your brand.
One key integration that can help with creating a seamless and enhanced customer experience is your SMS marketing tool. And there is no need to stray far to find the right SMS tool.
