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Multi-Channel Ecommerce Software for Centralized Management
Since 2003, ScienceSoft is a reliable provider of ecommerce software development services.
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Is There Specific Software for Multi-Channel Sales?
Multi-channel ecommerce software is a coherent ecosystem of technologies altogether helping retailers sell to customers via multiple digital channels conveniently. Any business system assumes the role of multi-channel software if it forms a part of a multi-channel environment.
Key Processes to Automate with Multi-Channel Ecommerce Software
In a multi-channel ecommerce environment, manual control over data leads to slow processes, data losses and inconsistencies across the channels resulting, for example, in order processing errors and irritated customers. When tasked to design a multi-channel ecommerce solution, ScienceSoft finds it important to automate data movement and streamline processes affecting business success. Take a look at the three most important business areas and specific systems we integrate and use our ecosystem illustrations as blueprints for automating your multi-channel sales.
1. Customer experience management and personalization
Software to integrate:
Customer data platform
Functional capabilities
- Automated collection of customer data: demographic, transactional, behavioral.
- Sophisticated customer segmentation.
- Identity resolution to avoid duplicate customer profiles.
- Pre-built APIs for the integration with marketing and customer support systems.
- Customer data analytics and customizable reports.
Integration value
- A single customer view collected from all digital channels with no time-consuming manual involvement.
- Accurate customer data for targeted marketing and effective customer support.
Personalization tool
Functional capabilities
- On-site personalization: online merchandizing, product recommendations, dynamic product bundles, non-catalog content, pop-ups.
- Mobile app personalization.
- Email personalization.
- A/B testing.
- Personalization analytics.
Integration value
- No-code marketing personalization.
- Higher ROI from marketing activities due to better targeting a customer’s individual preferences.
Customer support
Functional capabilities
- A unified agent dashboard for multi-channel customer support.
- Access to a customer’s profile with transaction history.
- Rule-based case routing, prioritization and escalation.
- Knowledge articles that can be made publicly available or kept within the customer service hub.
- AI-powered chatbots.
- Automated customer satisfaction and case-closed surveys.
- AI-powered detection of trends across channels, agents and support topics.
Integration value
- Reduced response and resolution time for customer cases.
- Faster onboarding of customer support agents.
- Contribution to improved customer retention.
ScienceSoft recommends
Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Insights as a customer data platform
Description
- Collects transactional, behavioral, and demographic customer data.
- May be complemented with Customer Voice (sold separately) to send and process customer surveys.
- Recognized a Leader among customer analytics technologies by Forrester.
- Offers a connector to Power BI for user-friendly data visualization.
- Integrates with Azure Machine Learning to build custom machine learning models and create better visibility into multi-channel customer behavior.
Pricing
Dynamics 365 Customer Insights:
- $1,500 tenant/month/100,000 customer profiles
Dynamics 365 Customer Voice:
- free if purchased together with selected Dynamics products (details are here)
- $200 tenant/month as a standalone product
Microsoft Dynamics 365 as customer support software
Description
- Designed for omnichannel customer support across multiple digital messaging and voice channels.
- Offers Power Virtual Agents to create chatbots without involving developers.
- Integrates natively with Microsoft Teams for corporate collaboration.
Pricing
- Professional edition – $50 user/month
- Enterprise edition - $95 user/month
Nosto as a personalization tool
Description
- Generated about $2 billion of additional revenue for their clients.
- Native integrations to the most popular ecommerce platforms.
- Data privacy control tools.
- Offers personalization examples for different goals (to increase conversions or average order value), website pages, or product verticals.
Pricing
a fee from sales attributed to Nosto personalization. Request a demo and contact the team directly for more details.
2. Inventory and order management
Software to integrate:
Inventory and order management software
Functional capabilities
- Configurable order and return management workflows.
- Automated invoice generation.
- Creation of shipping labels.
- Real-time order tracking.
- Centralized inventory management for multiple sales channels.
- Safety stock configured at the global business level or by channels.
- An application for store associates to process in-store pickup orders.
- Automated splitting of orders with several shipping addresses into several shipment requests.
- Shipment dashboards.
- On-hand/low-stock inventory reporting.
Integration value
- Faster order processing.
- Improved customer after-purchase experience.
- Real-time inventory visibility, quick restock decisions, and better procurement planning based on customer demand.
ERP/accounting software
Functional capabilities
- Access control based on roles and permissions.
- Invoice processing.
- Automated reminders to customers of payment due dates for installment payments.
- Centralized tax management and reporting.
- Management of recurring billing.
- Multi-currency support.
- Consolidated reports for transactional financial data.
Integration value
- Unified view of all financial data.
- Real-time visibility into business-wide performance and contribution of each sales channel.
- No chance of human errors caused by manual data transfer, thus reliable accuracy of financial reports.
ScienceSoft recommends
Magento OMS for Adobe Commerce as inventory and order management software
Description
- An all-in-one solution to manage inventory across multiple locations (warehouses, drop shippers, points of sale) and fulfil orders from multiple channels (both digital and physical).
- Recognized among strong-performing omnichannel order management systems by Forrester.
- Built-in support for single- and multi-address orders, door-to-door and BOPIS delivery.
- Integrates with any payment service provider and supports offline payment methods.
Acumatica as an ERP system
Description
- Ranked highly on the market of ERP providers by IDC and Gartner.
- ERP solutions tailored to ecommerce, manufacturing, and construction industries.
- Along with a financial and accounting module, offers a full suite of applications for business management including CRM, inventory, procurement and order management.
- Best for mid-sized businesses with $10 million to $200 million in annual revenue.
Pricing
Depends on:
- Acumatica applications you choose to use.
- License type.
- The volume of your business transactions and required data storage.
3. Product information management
Software to integrate:
Functional capabilities
- Product data import from spreadsheets.
- Product catalog structuring: categories, product families, and attributes.
- Diverse product information in text and digital formats.
- Bulk actions on multiple products.
- A possibility to create product descriptions tailored to distribution channel specifics.
- Approval workflow to validate uploaded product information and ensure its consistency with established rules.
- Configurable business rules to automate product data enrichment.
- Version control.
- Product information localization.
Integration value
- Higher productivity of a product management team.
- Faster delivery of new products to the digital market.
- Better targeting the audience of different sales channels.
- More informed product choices by customers and fewer product returns.
ScienceSoft recommends
Akeneo as a product information management system
Description
- Named a Leader in IDC Marketscape for PIM vendors.
- Feature-packed to meet product information management needs comprehensively.
- Targets mainly mid-sized clients but steps into the enterprise market too.
- Integrates with printing tools for businesses selling in brick-and-mortar stores.
Pricing
- Akeneo Community edition – free.
- Akeneo Enterprise edition – depends on the number of channels needed. Request implementation cost
How to Make a Multi-Channel Ecommerce Project a Success
Working with companies on the way to multi-channel sales, ScienceSoft helps them flex business and technology strategies to manage a new business model. Over time, we have elaborated several best practices we commonly recommend.
Keep consistent UI across customer touchpoints
Keep the same branding image throughout your webstore, mobile app, social media – PIM will help you with product data consistency while most marketplaces offer to add branding elements to a seller’s homepage.
Find an optimal delivery scenario
It may be cost-effective for you to delegate stock management to a marketplace. In this case, a marketplace is responsible for inventory storage, order dispatch and return management.
Conduct target audience research for each customer touchpoint
Develop insights into the behavioral patterns and interests of personas you target within each digital channel. This may give you inspiration on how to engage them in omnichannel journeys.
Don’t copy multi-channel ecommerce strategies from other market players
You never know all the unique business requirements that shaped those strategies and may be prone to irrational decisions leading to costlier implementation scenarios.
How to Plan the Investment
The costs of multi-channel ecommerce solutions vary greatly depending on integration scenarios and technology choices. A precise project estimation may be given only after thorough business analysis. Among key cost factors are:
- Number of sales channels.
- Scope of marketing and customer engagement capabilities you need.
- Number of product SKUs.
- Warehousing and logistics network.
- Order fulfillment models you support.
Examples of ecommerce integration scenarios with the cost
|
Integration of ERP into an ecommerce ecosystem (the cost depends much on the ERP customization scope) |
Integration of PIM into an ecommerce ecosystem (the cost depends much on the number of information sources and distribution channels) |
|
Starts from $75,000 |
Starts from $50,000 |
Ready to Go Multi-Channel?
Work with professional ecommerce consultants and senior developers from ScienceSoft to set up a multi-channel ecommerce solution tailored to your goals.
Ecommerce consulting for multi-channel setup
- Investigation of your business needs.
- Ecommerce multi-channel strategy planning.
- Target audience research.
- Market entry consulting.
- Ecommerce software comparison and consulting.
- Multi-channel IT ecosystem design.
Ecommerce development for multi-channel setup
- Business analysis.
- Web store development and launch (if needed).
- Implementation of digital technologies supporting the required business processes.
- Integration between business systems and sales channels (like we’ve described for the core business processes above).
About ScienceSoft
Since 2003, ScienceSoft has been growing expertise in ecommerce consulting and software development. We rely on the knowledge gained over the years-long work to use the transformative power of digital technologies for the benefit of retail businesses.