The Crucial Role of eCommerce CRM Integration

With ongoing supply chain volatility, an increasingly competitive landscape, and organizational challenges afflicting distribution businesses, a lot can stand in the way of focusing on selling and delivering standout customer experiences. Distributors seeking to seize every sales opportunity and boost sales in the years to come should be leveraging solutions that unlock new opportunities and areas for growth.

One example of this is the interplay between eCommerce and traditional sales strategies. Bringing multiple sales channels together will reshape the narrative of how businesses engage with customers. Integrating online buying activity into daily operations and maximizing its value can take a bit of fine-tuning, however. Over the last decade, the conversation has been around how eCommerce initiatives can fully and effectively integrate with distributors’ customer relationship management (CRM) tools to achieve this. But they couldn’t … until now.

A New Era of Selling

Some third-party apps and add-ons that connect online demand and customer activity with sales platforms do exist in the marketplace. But these historic integrations fall short, and fall especially short for distributors, in several ways. One is that distributors who only rely on an ERP will need multiple integrations to get eCommerce data in the right hands.

This can be time-consuming, clunky and expensive, typically costing at least a few thousand dollars a year to support. They also may not display customer data in an intuitive, actionable way like a CRM with a built-in BI solution provides. This also assumes that these integrations consistently work as intended, or work at all, which isn’t always a guarantee. 

White Cup’s newly launched eCommerce CRM integration solves for this by allowing distributors to see customers’ online activity and take action on those insights within their CRM and BI tools. This native integration makes customers’ online activity visible and actionable. It offers sales and marketing teams a clear view into these behaviors so they can take action in real-time and capture otherwise missed opportunities.

If shoppers are visiting a distributor’s website, browsing through products as if they’re flipping through a catalog, and ultimately moving on without initiating a purchase, big opportunities will be left on the table. 

By integrating eCommerce channels with your CRM, your sales reps have access to customers’ online activities within the dashboards they’re already using and can use this data to pick up the phone or set up automated email correspondence and have more personalized and engaging conversations.

 

The Benefits of CRM eCommerce Integration

Distributors who understand the opportunities that the interplay between eCommerce activities and human-led sales have will gain a significant competitive edge. The key here is synergy. It’s about leveraging the strengths of online buying with more human sales interactions to create a comprehensive, more meaningful customer experience. 

It’s understanding that an engaging online presence can serve as a springboard for offline conversions, and vice versa. It’s not merely about transitioning sales from one platform to another; it’s about harmony, each channel complementing and amplifying the other.

What makes White Cup CRM’s integration with eCommerce especially powerful is its ability to offer sales teams a wealth of information about customer behavior, preferences, and purchase patterns without burdening IT for custom reports. This integration solves for the all-too-common data disconnect that hampers many distribution businesses. An influx of data is a great thing, but it needs to be accessible, easily understood and properly analyzed to catalyze action. 

Armed with real-time insights that a fully integrated eCommerce, ERP, CRM, and BI ecosystem offers, sales reps can swiftly adapt strategies, personalize interactions, and spot upselling and cross-selling opportunities that drive more revenue. Each team member can gather the insights and recommended actions most relevant to them with role-based dashboards. The benefit here is tapping into the way people shop, seeing what they’ve left in their carts, following up at the right time, and then winning more deals because the insights your sales team needs are always within reach.

Integration Options and Use Cases

White Cup facilitates eCommerce CRM integration with online selling platforms distributors are already using, including WooCommerce, Magento, BigCommerce, and Shopify. These integrations turn what was once thought of as a mere facilitator of online transactions into a dynamic revenue engine with business intelligence from your ERP and CRM.

The new eCommerce dashboard in White Cup BI includes insights across all customers, including total website visits, top online order customers, top abandoned cart products, top purchased products, and sales broken down by online and offline orders. This provides a clear view of how each sales channel contributes to your top line over time.

Each department within your organization can tap into the potential of eCommerce in specific ways that foster exceptional customer experiences, increase sales potential, and drive profits. Here are a few example use cases of CRM and eCommerce integration by role.

 

Sales	Create an automated workflow in White Cup CRM that prompts the sales team to follow up on abandoned carts online.
Marketing	Segment customers based on their eCommerce behavior and send targeted email campaigns through White Cup CRM.
Product Management/Operations	Report on historical data and forecast product demand more accurately and manage inventory more efficiently by unifying product data from online and offline sources in White Cup BI.
Executive Team	Leverage insights from eCommerce data within White Cup BI to make strategic business decisions and set sales goals.
Customer Support	Access customers’ online activity to provide more individualized support.

 

Tap Into the Potential of CRM and eCommerce Integration Software

For distributors navigating an increasingly competitive industry, leveraging eCommerce activities to bolster human-led sales is not just a strategy; it’s a necessity. Equipped with intuitive tools that pull user activity from your eCommerce platform, log each customer’s behavior in your CRM, and then compile this information into actionable insights that streamlines your online initiatives to drive real sales results.

White Cup is the first distributor-focused CRM provider to offer an eCommerce integration that turns online browsing into a vehicle for buying. Schedule a demo to see how integrating with White Cup CRM and BI can help you win more.