In today's digital landscape, selecting the right eCommerce platform is paramount for achieving online sales success. Companies rely heavily on ERP systems to streamline operations, manage resources, and boost efficiency on the backend of the business. Pairing the right eCommerce solution with your existing ERP can help take your company from good to great, and a strong ERP eCommerce integration can be the key to success.
Generally, there are two platforms for eCommerce integration, Bolt-On solutions and Full eCommerce solutions.
What is a Bolt-On Solution?
A bolt-on solution, sometimes known as bolt-on software, is a module or tool that works in tandem with an ERP for a specific business functionality. Bolt-on solutions tend to be for specific business needs like payroll or CRM. While bolt-on solutions are good at their specific function, they're often very limited in expanding and integrating capabilities beyond their niche.
The Pros and Cons of a Bolt-On eCommerce Solution
The Benefit of a Bolt-On eCommerce Solution
There are a handful of Bolt-On eCommerce solutions, and as the name suggests, these eCommerce solutions are usually designed to sit on top of a specific ERP. For example, ERP2Web is an eCommerce solution specifically designed for running on JD Edwards EnterpriseOne.
Because these solutions are designed with such tight parameters, users find they are often
- Quick to Implement
- Have a Lower Initial Cost
- Simple to Understand
While these tight parameters are helpful for the above reasons, they also severely limit the abilities the solution can provide.
The Downsides of a Bolt-On eCommerce Solution
- Lack of Marketing Capabilities: Because bolt-on solutions are usually relatively bare-bones, they often feature minimal marketing abilities. An example would be the absence of personalized experiences. While a lack of personalization abilities is not detrimental to sales, the ability to add personalization tokens enhances a buyer's experience and often results in an improved buyer's journey and experience, culminating with a higher probability of orders being placed.
- Limited Integration: As many bolt-on solutions are created with specific ERPs in mind, they often lack the ability to integrate with external applications, limiting their functionality and capability. This often leads to patchwork integration where eCommerce site administrators need to integrate multiple third-party tools and extensions in order to manage their eCommerce site. While possible, this overcomplicated management of the site can lead to a disjointed user experience and an inability to scale the site according to a business's growing needs.
- Dependency on Third-Party Providers: With limited integration, these eCommerce sites obtain a heavy reliance on third-party providers and can introduce compatibility issues and service disruptions.
- Inflexibility: Similar to the limited integration capabilities, bolt-on solutions are usually extremely inflexible and don't mesh well with complex infrastructures. This limitation often poses as a huge and costly challenge for businesses seeking to adapt to market dynamics.
- Limited Control Over UI: While bolt-ons are often simple to set up, due to that simplicity these solutions offer limited control over the user interface. This may work for some sites and administrators, but others, looking to do more customizations will struggle with the limited capabilities bolt-on eCommerce solutions provide.
What is a Full eCommerce Solution?
While a bolt-on platform sits on top of your ERP, a full eCommerce solution is a set of tools that works in tandem with your existing ERP. The Full eCommerce Solution includes a variety of tools and handles all eCommerce needs from entering SKUs to shipping out products and collecting payments. Because full eCommerce solutions are all-encompassing, they can be more complicated to implement than a bolt-on solution; however, their abilities are much greater and their toolsets more vast.
The Pros and Cons of a Full eCommerce Solution
The Benefit of a Full eCommerce Solution
With Full eCommerce solutions, the effort is invested early on with the payoff coming after the initial implementation.
Due to the flexibility of full eCommerce solutions, businesses are able to neatly integrate with their existing ERP while also enhancing the overall buyer experience, leading to reduced time spent on site management and an increase in repeat customers.
- Customization and Scalability: Full eCommerce platforms like Adobe Commerce allow for extensive customizations and scalability; this includes everything from adding SKUs and parent-child relationships, to customer address relationships, order management, and warehouse management.
- Integration Capabilities: Full eCommerce Solutions are designed to integrate with a variety of ERP and CMS systems, as opposed to Bolt-On solutions which tend to be designed to integrate with specific platforms. This variety of integration capabilities allows businesses to keep their options open for ERP migrations as company profits, customers, and product catalogs grow.
- Customer Management: Full eCommerce Solutions offer a variety of CRM tools including customer specific catalogs, portal pricing, quick ordering, and invoice lookups improving your customer management and B2B customer experience.
- Omnichannel Capabilities: Due to the variety of tools at its disposal together with the integration capabilities, full eCommerce solutions easily allow for omnichannel capabilities allowing B2B and B2C customers to shop online, in-store, or via a product catalog.
- Security and Compliance: Due to the upfront business investment and quality of business users, full eCommerce integration solutions tend to have regular updates and security patches to ensure data protection and regulatory compliance for companies and customers alike.
- Analytics and Reporting: As a full eCommerce solution, eCommerce platforms tend to have robust reporting and analytics tools. Tools like customizable dashboards provide insights into product popularity, ordering trends, and customer behavior, information that can be extremely valuable for marketing, sales, and product teams.
- Marketing Capabilities: Full eCommerce solutions support personalized shopping experiences and efficient implementation of marketing strategies. Using the analytics and reporting mentioned above, full eCommerce solutions like Adobe Commerce allow for data-driven marketing efforts for increasing traffic to your site and increasing average order values.
- Advanced Reporting: Together with the analytics and reporting tool, advanced reporting provides comprehensive sales data and insights to be used for guiding informed decisions across your business whether it be for managing inventory, marketing efforts, or customer account management.
With an exhaustive list of tools and capabilities such as these, full eCommerce solutions like Magento by Adobe Commerce tend to have a higher initial cost and, for the inexperienced, can be complicated to integrate with your ERP.
The Downsides of a Full Platform eCommerce Solution
- Higher initial cost
- Complex Implementation and Integration
- Technical Expertise
Choosing the Right eCommerce Platform for You
Selecting the right eCommerce solution for your B2B and B2C needs is pivotal for maximizing business efficiency. While bolt-on eCommerce integration solutions offer a quick and potentially lower-cost solution, they come with significant limitations in ERP flexibility, scalability, and user experience.
In contrast, full eCommerce platform solutions like Adobe Commerce represent an investment that will provide comprehensive capabilities that allow for greater customization, integration, and scalability, setting your business up for long-term success.
Learn more about eCommerce integration success by reading this JD Edwards EnterpriseOne and Magento by Adobe Commerce eCommerce integration.
Curious to find out more about the right ERP eCommerce integration platform for your business? Speak to our integration specialists to find out.
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