Ecommerce-based firms or those transitioning from traditional retail to online have a wide array of tools and services at their disposal to drive the business forward. While many smaller firms might start with a set of point solutions to meet their needs, adopting an ERP sooner rather than later can save substantial time, and create efficiencies as the organization and volume of sales grow.
Business is chaos, especially for those faced with the fast-moving world of online retail. When the penny drops that an enterprise resource planning (ERP) tool is of value to small companies as well as large, retail-focused firms can build a singular view of their company.
Delivered as SaaS, resource management underpins the growth of any business. SaaS empowers new businesses with faster time to market, lower up-front costs, and no maintenance.
And Infor’s product upgrade cadence means the latest features that suit ecommerce and retailers are delivered regularly. Recent updates include Infor’s ColemanAI artificial intelligence (AI) features to boost customer satisfaction, increase revenues and optimize the vendor selection process.
ERPs help manage multiple business processes, handle accounts, materials, production, sales, and payroll. And by providing an interlinked view of business processes, growth, and strategy, it is easier to plan your sales and marketing efforts.
All of these functions are critical and as soon as any business gets beyond a handful of employees, having that singular view of operations, cash, and processes becomes essential. Modern ERPs are typically cloud-enabled to provide an instant-on service, and are configurable to the needs of most verticals or business types to provide the features you need today, and tomorrow.
Let ERP Manage the Business So You Can Focus on Selling
With an ERP in place, taking Infor’s CloudSuite as an example, you can integrate your ecommerce platform like Shopify (using Infor Rhythm for Commerce or eCommerce Connector) for that holistic overview of the business. CloudSuite also integrates with Amazon AWS to support a host of business, commerce, and retail solutions, enabling firms to buy, deploy and run tools that transform their business in hours, not weeks or months.
Cloudsuite supports traditional retailers with demand planning and logistics, and ecommerce brands with customer engagement, product information management, personalized shopping experience, and more features to add value and performance.
All of that integrated across the business, so your team can identify sales opportunities and keep an up-to-the-minute view of revenue and profit. Where most ERPs can be incomplete is when it comes to some specific ecommerce features like handling chargebacks and similar finance tasks.
Adding Chargeback and Payment Integration to Your ERP
Chargeback features like those offered by Cartis are key in the high-volume ecommerce world, helping businesses reduce costs, increase operational efficiency and keep customers (and banks) happy while improving profitability.
Many firms go from zero to tens of millions of dollars in revenue across millions of transactions at a frightening speed. Having to process chargebacks manually, using the likes of Quickbooks or other tools is unsustainable and costly.
Getting ahead of the growth curve with an ERP that can handle chargebacks will overcome the issue of underpowered systems that cannot scale, and can improve the level of automation to allow leaders and teams to focus on key operational issues.
Whatever your business ambitions, understanding the benefits of SaaS, ERP, and integrating with modern chargeback and other tools is key to getting the online sales side running at maximum efficiency. That’s whether you’re dropshipping or expanding a boutique retailer to offer more products.
And, for those planning to take on Amazon or other giants, managing every cent, and every second of business time is vital to delivering the most efficient service and maximizing revenue. Get in touch with Cartis to find out how our payment integration can put the finishing flourish to your ecommerce efforts.