E-commerce is on the boom in the UAE. Favorable tax legislation with zero corporate tax rates and a world-class logistics sector make the UAE an ideal hist jurisdiction to set up an e-commerce venture.

As a result, the UAE retail e-commerce market reached a record $3.9 billion in 2020, a 53% year-over-year increase driven by the Covid-19-led digital shift, while e-commerce accounted for an 8% share of the retail market during the same year, new analysis from Dubai Chamber of Commerce and Industry has revealed.

This trend is likely to continue with special licenses and freezones such as Dubai Commercity enabling turnkey solutions. However, a storefront with a strong e-commerce user experience is just a start.

Succeeding in a competitive market is dependent on many factors including product line, stock management, pricing, logistics, responding to market trends, differentiating the digital presence, online visibility, and speed of service amongst a few. Efficiency, performance management, reporting, and agility are prerequisites to sustainable growth and enabling any venture to grow into new geographic markets.

Apart from the many advantages over a physical store, operating an online store requires the ability to optimize all your internal process workflows and reporting. The ideal way to achieve this is by integrating an online store with an ERP to control end-to-end processes.

By integrating these two systems, many business tasks can be automated for more efficient operations. ERP systems are designed to fully control all internal processes from sales, and purchasing to financial reporting and all processes in between. Connecting and automating all business and data workflows brings superior control and efficiency.

In this blog, we will look at the reasons why you need to integrate your ERP to your E-commerce site sooner rather than later.

Why integrate your E-commerce store with an ERP?

The greater the competition in your market, the greater the need to operate at the lowest cost with the highest levels of internal efficiency. Technology will play a critical role to manage growth, delivering efficiency, and supporting any digital transformation to manage your market-facing processes.

An ERP often sits at the heart of this strategy and enables any enterprise to control a wide range of business workflows from customer-centric processes such as sales, support, manufacturing, and project execution to control of internal resources in stock, human capital, and financial reporting.

Some of the main reasons why you should consider integrating your e-commerce and ERP are:

1. Customer Management: Every business aims to provide its customers with quick and efficient service. By integrating your ERP system with your e-commerce, you can take advantage of real-time integration, while also keeping in close contact with your customers and vendors. Automating tasks allows you to collect customer data, make product collections, and ship products faster.
2. Effective and Efficient Inventory Management: Inventory plays a vital role in any company but is especially important in e-commerce companies. Integrating ERP software with e-commerce enables you to manage inventory more efficiently to manage product pricing, promotions, and stock availability up to date. Furthermore, order fulfillment is faster with an ERP system, so orders are not accumulated and customers can receive goods faster.
3. Reduced time and cost: It becomes increasingly difficult to effectively manage your operations with the marginal cost of operations and control your resources as your business grows. Integrating online with internal operations will help to reduce costs and time. Warehousing, logistics, and shipping can be integrated into one flow and reported on manage performance and report to customers.
4. Enhance transparency and reporting: Connecting dataflows eliminates entering the same data in different systems or excel. This will reduce the chance of duplicate data and orders are fulfilled faster and without any errors. The seamless flow of data from your e-commerce platform into your ERP will allow for advanced reporting hence allowing you to manage your time and cost as it automates the management process.
5. Accurate accounting and invoicing: ERP integration with e-commerce allows you to coordinate your accounting and invoicing, two essential financial functions for businesses. The business process would include an order being placed on the e-commerce platform being pushed into the ERP where the inventory is updated, invoice and delivery notes are generated automatically. This means that financial data is populated in the accounting module with little or no human interference which ultimately results in accurate financial reporting.

Integration between these two platforms or extending an ERP to online is a business-changing decision. This can provide immense competitive and operational benefits. It is critical that you place strategic weight on its impact sooner rather than later to give your business venture every chance of success and scale with minimal cost.

About SimplySolved

At SimplySolved, we deliver our ERP solutions with embedded ISO 9001 & 27001 Quality standards under a business workflow centric agile methodology. Through our approach we possess the process domain and IT expertise to advise, plan and deliver our solutions to a consistent outcome that will grow with your company.

Our best in class cloud enterprise management solution can help your organization automate and master your business processes. Designed to be UAE VAT compliant with FTA Audit File support with complex Tax Group functionality, our ERP solution is available in both English & Arabic.

Call us at (+971) 4 3445338 or visit us at www.it.simplysolved.ae