5 Ways to Improve
Checkout Experience

With the holiday season for the year 2017 in full swing there are some important things that should be considered by e-commerce merchants. The primary amongst them is optimizing the customer after checkout experience. An optimized checkout experience is where the actual money in e-commerce is.
An ERP and E-commerce integration ticks all the major boxes which are required to optimize the after checkout experience.

Optimizing Customer checkout experience

Optimizing customer experience is not a mean fete given the amount of shopper traffic experienced by e-commerce sites. Most of the e-commerce strategies are mostly centered on ‘Reducing Shopping cart abandonment’, but it is even important to provide a great after checkout experience.
In this blog we show how a simple automation like an ERP e-commerce integration could drastically transform you’re after checkout experience both during and after holiday season.

1. Customizing the thank you

Once the customer checks out of the cart, even the most seasoned of e-commerce companies take the next step for granted. However, sending out a well-crafted Thank you mail goes a very long way in nurturing a long lasting relation with the customer. This is a step where a small ERP e-commerce automation goes a long way; once an order is placed; there is generally a resource who takes care of entering all the approved products into the ERP system. There would be a major scope for discrepancies in this system. But with an ERP e-commerce integration, as soon as the order is placed in the E-commerce platform the pre-defined attribute fields are populated in the ERP system in a single go.
With the scope for errors taken care of the sending a great thank you email after ordering becomes a tad bit easy because the orders placed and successfully approved populates in real time. This takes care of a consistent user experience even during the holiday season spike.

• Increasing the possibility of ‘Drop shipping’

Drop shipping  is a very economical option for e-commerce merchants. And shipping being a major factor of after checkout customer experience it helps to have innovative options like ‘Drop shipping’.
E-commerce retailers need to look into the factor that the products drop shipped by them is the same as the order placed. In Drop shipping there is external sources at play as this service is offered by another member of the supply chain. E-commerce retailers should have a single window view of the inventory availability to assess and plan drop shipment according to the convenience of the customer.
This is where an ERP e-commerce integration comes into play. This helps e-commerce businesses to keep a track of where their inventory is placed in the supply chain due to the sync between their ERP and e-commerce platform. A connected ecommerce-ERP solution allows you to constantly see up to date inventory and avoid unnecessary backorders. Any changes related to depletion or replenishment of inventory in the supply chain reflects back in the e-commerce platform for the customer to view. Even the company representatives can plan their delivery and shipment accordingly, thanks to the single window view.
So the bottom line is drop shipment is made easy with an ERP e-commerce integration in place, and this greatly enhances after checkout customer experience.

3. Improving Customer Service

Most of e-commerce merchants fall short in providing a fool proof customer experience to their customers after an order is placed. A study by e-consultancy stated that customer experience is the single most exciting opportunity in e-commerce for the year 2017. Customer experience even beats Mobile commerce.
Now with such emphasis placed on customer experience, and with an increase in sales it is all but obvious that customers are put on hold for the agent to cater. This certainly is a red flag if the customer has to repeat themselves to different customer executives. An ERP e-commerce integration would go a long way in easing this bottleneck.
This integration helps in populating the customer details related to order placed, shipment details, financial details into the ERP and CRM systems in real time. This provides the same level of consistency to the customer care representative irrespective of what customer they are dealing with. This ERP e-commerce integration helps them in taking effective decisions based on real time single window access.
Also, ERP e-commerce integration even helps in improving your sales by giving your customer care representatives the ability to upsell or cross sell products. This is done due to their access of the previous placed order history, which is made available due to this integration.

4. Streamlining Order fulfillment becomes easier

Order fulfillment is the most important part of after checkout experience. The most customer friendly experience and even the easiest and user friendly e-commerce interface cannot save your brand image if you would falter in delivering a streamlined order fulfillment. Taking time to pick and pack the products, incorrect packaging, delivery to wrong address and using manual resources to transfer orders from e-commerce system to ERP are a definite No for a growing e-commerce business.
With an ERP e-commerce integration, syncing orders becomes easier. Based on the inventory availability whose visibility becomes easy due to ERP e-commerce integration apart from drop shipping, splitting of orders and routing to convenient warehouses becomes easier. Syncing the order status and shipping tracking number becomes easy, risk of shipping to the wrong address becomes less due to mitigation of human intervention.
In short an ERP e-commerce integration makes the process of communication transparent and easier because the details which are entered by the customers are synced back to the backend systems (ERP, CRM) in real time and this greatly reduces the scope for errors.
This greatly helps customer experience during the normal as well as the peak holiday season and make the post checkout experience climb a few notches higher.

5. Offering great returns management

Returns are the next major step in deciding the post checkout customer experience in e-commerce. Having a customer friendly returns policy is the bulwark of any sound e-commerce strategy and sadly the one most often neglected.
When a customer returns a product they speak to a customer service executive who looks up to the original bill in the ERP system. After verification a return merchandize authorization is created. The customer sends the RMA back to the company. The product is received, it goes back into inventory and the accounting department gets a notification.
Now with a manual resource in place this tends to get tedious leaving a scope for error. According to a study by Invesp, 30% of the orders placed online are returned, and any error in this could lead to customer dissatisfaction and loss of brand image.

Conclusion

This whole drill gets very tedious especially during the holiday season when there is more scope for errors due to the amount of manual intervention. This kind of complex workflow is a lot easier to manage with a proper ERP e-commerce integration in place; the end result is increased productivity and enhanced after checkout experience for customers. The reason being real time syncing of the customer return address and financial details which makes taking back the order quick and transferring the amount correctly to their accounts. This is made possible with an ERP e-commerce integration in place.

About Us

i95Dev is a Magento certified Solutions Partner. Our services range from building an integrated ecosystem to developing Magento stores for customers spread across industries. We worked on a variety of ERPs like MS Dynamics NAV, AX, GP, Sage 100 and SAP B1 along with Magento and helped customer across the world to make their online store.