Virtual Logistics' Ecommerce Data Integration Blog

How many people have heard the term marketing automation? What about lead nurturing or customer nurturing? You may have heard these terms before and thought they are not for my business, I have a web store so why would marketing automation work for me. Marketing automation can indeed help you market to and nurture both your potential customers as well as your current customers by helping you segment and send targeted collateral to the right customer, at the right time starting as soon as they place an order in your store. 

It has been said that a picture is worth a 1000 words. With that old adage in mind VL has released another series of infographics about where your data integration lives and how middleware can help your on premise and cloud applications communicate once you have chosen your system. 

A well planned ecommerce integration and whether to choose a middleware package over a single silo EDI solution is closely related. Before I begin to examine this relationship it is important to define a couple of key terms.

Here at Virtual Logistics trade show season is in full swing which means that there is a lot of talk around the office about e-commerce integration. This month, Virtual Logistics was exhibiting at the Magento ecommerce world Imagine 2013 in Las Vegas, Nevada where we partnered with SmartOSC to demo end to end Magento e-commerce integration. The trade show was a huge success and another great opportunity for Virtual Logistics to discuss with people about e-commerce integration. There is more to come on the Magento Imagine trade show in a future blog article, but, our demo and our partnership got me thinking; what does Magento end to end integration actually look like?

This past week I have been reading a lot about marketing automation. In an earlier blog article titled 4 key considerations for successful ecommerce integration, I talked about the importance of choosing a system that allows the integration of all of your social media elements, but your social media tools are not the only thing that you need to consider. What about your leads, contacts, campaigns and blog? That is where marketing automation comes in!

Ecommerce Integration - We’ve partnered with SmartOSC to promote Magento end to end e-commerce integration at Magento Imagine 2013 in Las Vegas. Read all about it in the press release below. We hope to see you in Las Vegas April 8-10.

This past week, Virtual Logistics attended Canada’s premier digital marketing and e-commerce conference, Dx3 at the Metro Toronto Convention Centre in downtown Toronto. Dx3’s tagline is ‘where Canadian business gets digital’, and content curator Ron Tite knows how to pick speakers that influence digital both in Canada and around the world. There were many educational opportunities at the show including keynote speeches from:

Should your E-commerce system be integrated? The answer is,more than likely, but what exactly does that phrase mean? In a blog post before Christmas we talked about Amazon’s staggering 35 orders a second from its UK website. Can you imagine what a nightmare that would be during the Christmas or summer shopping season if Amazon were not integrated? So that got me to thinking…what are the most important things to think when looking at E-commerce integration? I came up with 4 considerations or ‘pointers’ that our team here at VL always seem to be asking both current and potential customers in order to make sure that their E-commerce integration is a success.

Shopping cart data integration. In a blog post a couple of weeks ago I blogged about the integration nightmare before Christmas. The online shopping season is in full swing so I thought it would be interesting to look at how Amazon handles their Christmas order volume. Given that online sales are increasing all the time, integration and effective data handling is becoming a critical key component of the success of internet retailing. Here is an interesting statistic. Amazon at this time of year handles on average, in its UK operations, 35 orders a second off its web site. 35 orders a second! Its mind boggling, you don't do that volume manually or with poorly planned systems.

I received an email today from a customer who had been speaking to a fellow web storeowner about integration. Their conversation went some thing like this, I meet someone at a trade show who said they could integrate my web store to my back end ERP or 3PL, that was back in the spring, sounded good, cheap price, they still have not delivered and I found out they had out sourced the work to some southeast Asian country. Turns out the guy they hired got sick and almost died. So here we are 6 months later and I have nothing. Christmas is coming and I am desparate. The customer mentioned to me that the description mirrored what he had heard from other web store owners who were trying to get their shopping carts properly integrated to either their 3PL or their ERP. Is this the integration nightmare before Christmas?