Web Store <=> ERP Integration (Sage 300)

The Next Wave of Automation

Let’s preface this by saying that we will be focusing our discussion on the benefits of having a web store integrated to Sage 300 since that is our area of expertise. Our eCommerce platform, Webtelligence, is deeply integrated to Sage 300 so we’ll explore why that’s important to the typical small to medium sized wholesale distributor, who represents a big part of the Sage 300 community that we service.

Web stores are ubiquitous in the B2C (business to consumer) space. Marketplaces like Amazon are setting the standard by which all others are measured. We, as consumers, want a similar experience from every business we deal with.

As we demand more from the businesses we deal with in our personal lives, those demands are spilling over into our work lives. We want the same experience when dealing with our suppliers at work (B2B). And that’s a completely reasonable expectation. The technology exists. And yet there’s a significant disconnect between customers wanting this functionality and merchants providing it. Wholesale distributors need to embrace it.

Providing a B2C Experience for B2B

Let’s face it. It’s getting a lot easier for you to part with your money online, buying the things you want and need from the comfort of your home or office, on your time, not the merchants'. And you get on-demand access to your entire history with those retailers at the touch of a button. As a B2B business, you need to provide that same experience to your customers or they’ll find someone who will. According to Essential Retail, 43% of businesses they surveyed said they switched suppliers because of a lack of online ordering capabilities. 

Why Should You Care?

According to Tradegecko, 93% of B2B buyers prefer to buy online while 17% of B2B merchants provide that capability. Now that’s a disconnect that smells a lot like opportunity. If you’re one of the few that offers online purchasing to your customers, you stand a good chance of capturing more market share.

Customer Service & Loyalty

When customers find a supplier that allows them to do business when and where it’s convenient for them, that buys loyalty. Sure you’ve got to have competitive pricing and provide good service, but those are table stakes to be in the game. It’s the extra stuff that sets you apart. Like offering online purchasing that allows customers to buy when and where it suits them. And as a bonus, you’re order desk is open 24/7.

So whether you’re order process is manual, meaning you take orders by phone, fax, or email and someone keys them into Sage, or you have a disconnected web store, the benefits are the same.

Benefits of Integration

Let’s look more specifically at the benefits of a system where your Sage 300 and web store are integrated. What does that really mean?

There are 2 sides to the integration equation: getting your products from Inventory Control onto the web and getting orders and payment from the web into Order Entry.

Getting the orders and payments into Sage is the easy part. Especially if you have a card processor that’s integrated to Sage 300, like Paya, APS Payments, or Paytelligence.

Getting your products onto your web store is another story.

When you’re in a B2B environment you’ve got several factors to deal with when presenting your products to your customers on a web store.

1. Do you offer volume discounts?
2. Do some customers get different prices than others? Identified as Base, A, B, C, D, and E Customer Type in Sage.
3. What about contract pricing?
4. What about sale pricing?
5. Can customers buy on terms?
6. What if they’re past due or over their credit limit?
7. Are some customers limited to specific products that they can buy? Identified on the price list assigned to them in Sage.
8. And a myriad of other potential questions.

If you’re familiar with Sage 300 you know that it deals with all of these pricing, product, and purchase terms questions as standard functionality. In order for you to provide a personalized and accurate shopping experience on your web store, you need to respect all of that so your customers get their price for their products with their purchase terms.

If your web store is not integrated to Sage 300 you’ll be faced with the daunting task of keeping both systems updated with the correct information. That’s a lot of work and inevitably, something gets missed or keyed incorrectly. That’s where the expensive problems start, not to mention the time and expense of maintaining disparate systems, and potential for a bad customer experience .

When something goes wrong you will either lose money on the orders or potentially lose a customer.

The big win with a properly integrated web store is avoiding those problems and alleviating all the work to keep 2 disparate systems in sync.

A properly integrated web store will automatically inherit all of your product details from Sage Inventory Control while providing the capability to supplement that detail with images, extended descriptions, videos, supporting documentation like user guides, assembly instruction, or any other supplementary documents, to name a few.

An integrated system will know your customer, based on their login, and provide their pricing and terms for the products they are eligible to buy.

The system will deliver orders directly to Sage Order Entry with payment details, if required, ready for fulfillment. Nobody needs to intercept or review the orders unless you want them to.

An integrated system eliminates all of the manual effort required to maintain a disconnected web store and avoids the inevitable mistakes that arise when human intervention (rekeying) is required.

What will you do with all that extra time and money you’ll save?

Better Use of Resources

How much time does it take to process a typical order in your current process? If you could redirect that time to other activities, what would that look like for your business? Here’s few things that our customers have done with their freed up time when they implemented Webtelligence.

• Staff takes time to introduce customers to the new web store and show them how to use it, emphasizing the focus on an improved customer experience and service, driving increased adoption of the new site and reducing order processing costs.
• More time is available to introduce new products or services to your customers, driving incremental revenue.
• Less time spent dealing with problems. Since customers place their own orders, there are less returns. More time to proactively grow the business.
• Offer and analyze different promotions to drive incremental revenue.
• Cross sell and up sell increasing the average order size and number of items per order.

Those are just a few of the immediate benefits an integrated system will provide. Interestingly, having a web store can actually increase in store sales as well, as many of our customers have experienced. Customers may prefer to do their research online but buy or pick up in store. It’s an increasing trend with online retailers.

Let’s Recap

With a non-integrated system, someone will have to manage the products on the web site to make sure the pricing is correct for every customer, descriptions are accurate, that specific products are still available to sell, and so on. Someone will also have to get the web orders into Sage for fulfillment. Probably by manually keying it in. And what happens when we manually key things from one system to another? Mistakes!

You can avoid all that with a properly integrated system. All product information becomes available to your web store if you want it there (simple check box) along with all customer specific pricing and terms. Orders and payments flow automatically into Sage for fulfillment. No re-keying of any data, ever.

What’s the Bottom Line?

With a properly integrated web store you will dramatically reduce the administrative overhead associated with a disconnected web store or manual process.

You’ll eliminate problems and effort caused by keying or pricing errors.

You’ll have happier customer because their orders are done correctly and on their terms. And they can manage their accounts online.

You’ll have happier employees because they no longer have to deal with the mind-numbing, soul-destroying task of keeping disparate data sources up to date.

You’ll have resources to deploy on more productive, revenue generating tasks.

So we can do this the hard way or we can do it the easy way. The smart money’s on the easy way; an integrated web store for Sage 300. And since we’re on the topic, if you’re looking, please consider Webtelligence.