This is referring to the automation between the back office and your retail website. Integrating your systems ensures they work seamlessly together and eliminates the need for manual processes, saving you time, and money and ensuring accuracy and efficiency. 

It is a system that enables electronic payments online. There are different ways that merchants can offer these payments. Some choose to offer fully integrated software solutions or third-party systems managed by service providers such as PayPal and WorldPay.

Many components make up an eCommerce system. These features could include; the shopping cart, integration capabilities, and security infrastructure. Each offers an important part in making sure that the system runs efficiently for both the merchant and their customers.

eCommerce integration involves implementing a shopping cart, merchant accounts, payment gateways, and security mechanisms with your website. This all helps to provide the merchant with an eCommerce system and a seamless shopping experience for the end customer.

So if we think of the software as the engine behind the scenes of an online store, then the system enables electronic payments. The software manages inventory, allows you to add or remove products, calculate the charges, order fulfilment etc.

By way of showing a friendly user interface people from non-technical backgrounds can manage the entire eCommerce operation. The back end of the interface is very multifaceted and a complex machine.

Any viable eCommerce software will enable customers to buy your products and services from your online store. Where solutions differ is the degree to which they can unify and leverage both front and back-office applications with both their unique and shared data. eCommerce platforms provide the unification of core business processes, where businesses can gain complete visibility across their company and ultimately meeting their most discerning customers’ expectations.

An eCommerce platform should allow for integrations between separate systems including; accounting, POS, inventory and order management, marketing, merchandising, customer service and financials on a cloud-based platform.

The benefits of having the software integrated allows you to provide reliable, consistent and personalised cross-channel experiences. You can offer superior customer service through a single view of all interactions and transactions across all touchpoints and channels.

You can also go above and beyond your customer expectations and increase your revenue by taking control of your orders and have one single view of what inventory you have across multiple channels and supply chains.

On-Premise: These are managed onsite by developers who take control of the manual updates and carry out any fixes that may need to be resolved. It offers merchants flexibility over hosted solutions. However, SaaS is becoming the preferred option, which you can discover more about below.

SaaS: Software as a Service (or “hosted”) solutions are much more detached from developers, in simple terms it isn’t maintained through company hard drives, you access it via the internet

The only requirements from development teams are usually for supplementary custom design features. You will be able to action any updates with one click or they happen automatically. This makes it a better choice for online merchants. It saves time for eCommerce stores using SaaS software and it’s also so much cheaper than on-premise solutions.

A payment gateway is a technology used by merchants to accept debit or credit card purchases from customers. So once you hit the buy button on a website, the payment gateway comes into action.

The next step is adding your bank card details. It is the front-end technology in charge of sending customer information to the merchant acquiring bank, for processing.

It then returns the transaction details and response from the payment network to the website you purchased from to inform them that the card is authorised, and therefore the order is completed.

In physical stores, payment gateways consist of the point of sale (POS) terminals used to accept credit card information by card or by smartphone. In recent years have begun accepting phone-based payments using QR codes or Near Field Communication (NFC) technology.

In online stores, payment gateways are the “checkout” portals used to enter credit card information or credentials for services such as PayPal.

Now that we have chip technologies, the signature phase on a credit/debit card has been replaced with a personal identification number (PIN) entered directly into the payment gateway hardware.

Contactless purchases are now so popular, and most of us now use our phones as payment devices instead of plastic credit cards.