Overview of E-Commerce Integration Solution

Traditional store-based retail is not going away. Customers will shop in stores as they always have. But they will soon expect the level of service to include web enabled retail services as a matter of course.

Customers will also expect more sophisticated handling of information about themselves and about their purchases than they would have expected in the past. Tolerance for a retailer's ignorance about their history or preferences will become less. This is only natural as expectations rise by experience.

Thus no retailer can afford to be without

1. A superior retail management system, and
2. An effective ecommerce solution.

The web store extends the physical store, and is an effective tool for attracting new shoppers and enhancing customer service creatively.

E-commerce strategy is a decision as important as location, merchandise or personnel and a key element that any retailer today should be looking for is integrated e-commerce.

Oddly, the majority of e-commerce solutions on the market today, do not integrate the physical store with the web store.

What elements would be included in an integrated site?

• Merchandise selection to the Web site directly from company inventory into the different departments of your choice with the ability to add enhanced descriptions and images
• Each style in inventory can be represented as a single web product
• Automatic polling of sales orders from the Web to the company main for fulfillment
• Inventory relieved upon order fulfillment
• Centralized data entry, for both inventory management and the e-commerce catalog
• Consolidated customer history and tracking
• Order notification
• Stock availability notification
• Defined shipping rates

Today these are the features of Retail Pro E-Commerce Integration (ECI). The first integrated e-commerce site on Retail Pro has been up and processing transactions since before Christmas 1999. (www.thedollery.com).

Without e-store integration, the retailer is required to maintain separate inventories, customer lists, and orders. This duplication of information costs time and money, and is error prone.

The Retail Pro ECI solution includes full integration between the store and the web store. It provides a structure for the web store catalog, but allows the retailer free choice of local service providers to help design, build and host the site.

Retail Pro ECI Merchandiser enables a retailer the ability to exchange data between Retail Pro and their web store. Through TCP/IP polling it posts merchandise to the web store and brings web purchases directly into Retail Pro as sales orders, where they can be processed and fulfilled normally.

Managers will enjoy the full spectrum of Retail Pro report and analysis products to track web store sales, compare profitability, learn the most effective types of merchandise to post, judge effective promotions from ineffective ones, and so forth.

Creating a Web store takes planning, preparation and work on the part of the retailer no matter how expert one's service providers may be. One must select which merchandise is going to be posted, get the proper image and descriptive material, arrange for fulfillment procedures, set policies, work out mechanics of credit card authorization, and so forth.

And most importantly - from the beginning your web store should be integrated with your physical store.