Easily Integrate Your Direct Selling
Business with External Systems
Trinity Software’s open API provides e commerce integrations with third party developers to connect and communicate with external ERP systems running webshop platforms such as Amazon, eBay, and Facebook just to name a few, and there are literally thousands of them. So, when it comes to adding plugins for selling your products on different webshop platforms, does your current software integrate with external systems without it costing you extra time and money?
If it does, it’s not all that surprising because there are a lot of software companies that charge you for building plugins, but wouldn’t it be nice if that wasn’t always the case? To effectively communicate with EPR and API systems in real-time, you need advanced MLM software with E-commerce integration capabilities such as Firestorm.
What is E commerce Integration?
Simply defined, E-commerce integration is the communicative timing between an E-commerce website and back-end inventory and accounting systems (EPR). Proper eCommerce external integration allows the flow of bidirectional information between the two systems. When you have advanced MLM software capabilities at your disposal, the information only needs to be coded into the system once.
What’s the Value of Being Able to Connect to Third-Party Systems?
The value of connecting to third-party systems with E-commerce integration can mean the difference between making a sale or not. For example, if an order arrives in your shopping cart from a third-party fulfillment service, you want that order transmitted in real-time over to the fulfillment service in order to fill that order rapidly and accurately because anything less can result in lost sales.
When a consumer puts an item in their shopping cart and then decides to purchase it, they want confirmation that the purchase has gone through and to verify that their shipping address is correct as well as receiving a tracking number for their purchase.
The core value in this type of integration is being able to provide your customers with what they want because in the real world if your MLM software can’t handle processing consumer purchases in real-time, they will simply go somewhere else and buy it.
3 Types of External Integrations
There are several types of external integrations that MLM businesses should have, and they all require plugins in order to work properly. If you are running an e-commerce business, your software should have at a bare minimum the capabilities for the following three external integrations:
- Fulfillment Center: Fulfillment centers are an important component of E-commerce. They are the physical location where your customer orders are fulfilled and processed.
- Communications: Communications such as Mailchimp and Constant Contact are needed for email templates, reporting, and automation for sending monthly emails to subscribers and customers.
- Payment Gateways: Payment gateways like Paypal, Payoneer, and others is the source of your money, and without eCommerce integrations with third party payment gateway services, you won’t be able to connect or get paid.
Writing Ecommerce External Integration Codes
Regardless of the eCommerce business model, external integration will make your life much easier and more profitable. E-commerce integration also makes expanding your system very easy, but that integration should be supported by your system and have the basic plumbing to make it work automatically, and the only piece that you should have to do is write the code.
You need to be able to integrate easily with external systems, but without writing a million lines of custom programming. On one hand, you might have to write 100 lines of code to talk to the warehouse’s API to actually transmit the format over in the form they expect, but on the other hand, integration to the external system should only require very minimal (if any) custom code.
The Benefits of Utilizing Firestorm
When it comes to eCommerce external integrations with third party systems, integrating with an external system will always require some level of work; however, Firestorm limits the amount of work required by building these base systems into the system in advance, so the customer doesn’t have to pay for them. As integrations occur on our platform, those plugins are available to you at no additional charge.
For example, communications to fulfillment centers, email marketing platforms, and payment gateways, these are the types of plugins that as people build or pay to build that creates additional expenses. Here at Trinity Software, we provide our customers with plugins at no additional charge, and that’s just one of the many features that we offer with our professional services.
For more information about E-commerce integration, give us a call at (817) 394-5404 or click here to see what Firestorm can do for you.
Learn More:
1. https://www.emailtooltester.com/en/blog/mailchimp-vs-constantcontact/
2. https://help.shopify.com/en/manual/shipping/fulfillment-services
3. https://services.amazon.com/fulfillment-by-amazon/multi-channel.html
Video Transcription
Ok, the next thing we’re going to talk about is integrations with external systems. The good example of where this would be required is if an order comes into your shopping cart, and you’re using a third party fulfillment service, you want that order transmitted in real time over to the fulfillment service to be able to fulfill that order rapidly and accurately. That integration should be supported by your system that should have the basic plumbing to make that work automatically. And then the only other piece that would have to be written – not that you would need to write a million lines of code, but you might need to write one hundred lines of code to talk to the warehouse’s API to actually transmit the order over in the format they expect.
So what we do here is integrating with an external system will always require some level of work, but we minimize the amount of work required by building these base capabilities into the system in advance so you don’t have to pay for them. So it makes expanding your system very easy and as integrations occur, on our platform, those plug-ins are available to you at no additional charge. So example things: lots of fulfillment center stuff, communications, MailChimp, Constant Contact. Those are the types of things that as people build the plug-in, paid to have it built, it’s now available to you. That’s one of the features of our system that we offer.