Starting a business isn’t as simple as building a website and listing products. You also need to manage inventory, handle customer service, track orders, and stay on top of your books.
Tools like email marketing, customer relationship management (CRM) platforms, POS systems, and inventory management software help you do all of this. But if they aren’t connected to your ecommerce store, you spend more time switching between platforms than growing your business.
The right ecommerce integrations connect your store to your apps so you can sync data, manage your audience, and track revenue from the same place. They also improve the shopping experience for your customers by keeping everything running smoothly behind the scenes.
With new integrations constantly rolling out, online business owners have more opportunities to learn how to use them to improve their experience. Keep reading to learn more about how your ecommerce business can start using integrations to streamline your internal and external processes.
Many marketers are asking, “Can Mailchimp track revenue from ecommerce integrations?” The answer is yes, and it’s easier than you might think. Mailchimp connects to stores like Shopify, WooCommerce, and BigCommerce. Once connected, your store’s sales data syncs with your Mailchimp account automatically. Then, you can see which emails and personalized campaigns drive real purchases, without any spreadsheets needed.
What are ecommerce integrations?
Ecommerce integrations connect the apps and tools your ecommerce business uses every day so they can share data automatically. Integrations don’t rely on manual data entry or switching between disconnected systems. Instead, they sync information across your ecommerce platform, sales channels, and marketing tools in real time.
This means your ecommerce operations run more smoothly. Your systems update when customers place orders, adding customer interactions to your CRM and sending campaign performance data to your reporting tools. The result is less busywork for your team and better customer satisfaction across every touchpoint.
As a Mailchimp customer, you don’t have to worry about creating your integrations. Instead, you can visit the integrations page to find integrations for your unique business website. These integrations expand your marketing capabilities by bringing in data to execute your marketing strategy and grow your business.
Fun fact: Our customers saw an average lift of 21% in their click rates in 1 week after connecting their store with our ecommerce integrations. This proves that integrations can improve your marketing efforts and help you connect with customers.
Benefits of integrating your ecommerce ecosystem
When your ecommerce platform connects with the tools you use every day, your entire ecommerce brand runs more efficiently. Without these connections, you may be leaving money on the table. Here are a few reasons to invest in integrations for your ecommerce operations:
- Save hours every week: Integrations reduce the manual work involved in everyday business processes. For example, Mailchimp can trigger abandoned cart flows based on customer actions. The time savings add up fast, with ecommerce customers reporting an average of 16 hours saved each week for their Marketing and Sales teams.
- Improve data accuracy across channels: When your systems sync in real time across various sales channels, you get accurate data you can actually trust. No more conflicting numbers between your online store, POS, and marketing tools.
- Enhance customer experience through personalization: Integrations pull customer data from various systems, making it easier to personalize emails, product recommendations, and messaging based on real customer behavior.
What are the different types of ecommerce integrations?
Ecommerce integrations can improve the online shopping experience for customers while improving internal processes like bookkeeping, order and inventory management, revenue tracking, and marketing. There are several types of integrations available for businesses that want to sell products or services online. Here’s a breakdown of the most common types and how they work.
Ecommerce platforms
Your ecommerce platform is the home base for your online store. It’s where you list products, manage orders, and welcome shoppers. Integrations connect your ecommerce platform to your marketing tools so you can use your store data beyond the checkout process. Connecting your store directly to your tools also supports more powerful automations as your business grows.
Mailchimp offers deep Shopify integration and also connects with popular platforms like WooCommerce and BigCommerce. The Mailchimp API also supports custom ecommerce integrations. When you connect your store, customer and order data syncs to Mailchimp for use in your email and SMS marketing.
You can use this data to personalize product recommendations, improve customer segmentation, and automate targeted campaigns. For example, you can use cart activity data to automate abandoned cart recovery campaigns. Or use browsing behavior data to send a welcome series to first-time browsers who sign up for your emails. You can also track results like email revenue and overall campaign sales to gauge your performance and improve over time.
Payment
While website design is crucial, functionality is even more important. Your online business needs to collect payments from customers. Unfortunately, this can be a complicated process if you’re new to the world of electronic commerce.
However, with payment integrations for online marketplaces, you can sync customers’ order data from your brick-and-mortar store POS and online stores.
Payment integrations can improve the customer experience by triggering automated post-purchase sequences when customers spend a specific dollar amount. In addition, they support smarter segmentation so you can tailor the product images and social proof each group sees.
With payment integrations, you can also give your ecommerce store shoppers more payment options. They can choose to pay with PayPal or a credit card.
The top electronic commerce payment gateways are PayPal, Stripe, and Square. Square is preferred for brick-and-mortar stores, but it provides a seamless online checkout experience.
On the other hand, PayPal is easier for ecommerce companies that want an easy solution. Stripe is best for capturing online sales for businesses with developers since it comes with comprehensive customization tools.
Pick the Right Payment Gateway for Your Business | |||
Payment Gateway | Best for | Key advantage | Checkout experience |
Square | Hybrid stores (retail & online) | Seamless POS and web sync | Card processing using a Square reader or online checkout |
PayPal | Ecommerce businesses | Quick to launch and widely trusted | Easy checkout with account login |
Stripe | Businesses with in-house developers | Comprehensive customization tools | Customizable online checkout |
Inventory management
Supply chain management and logistics are crucial for most brands selling online or in-store. To run your business effectively, you must track orders and manage your inventory to ensure you never run out of stock. An ecommerce company must have real-time inventory tracking that automatically updates its product listings when they’re out of stock.
Your software should also tell you when it’s time to reorder inventory and communicate with customers when an item is in stock again. Integrating your inventory management system with online stores gives you real-time visibility into your products. In addition, you can synchronize data across online and brick-and-mortar stores.
Integrating your ecommerce store with inventory management software helps you track items sold, replenish stock, identify your best-selling products, and improve forecasting.
Reporting and analytics
As a Mailchimp customer, you can access data from Mixpanel, Google Analytics, Firebase, and much more. Along with supporting integrations, this gives you data-driven insights into open rates, click-through rates, and sales from a central dashboard. You can also track customer lifetime value, average order value, and purchase behavior after automatically syncing transaction data.
Your ecommerce business relies on data to learn more about its customers and create more effective marketing campaigns. With analytics integrations, you can get access to insights to understand your marketing performance and create custom reports. Ecommerce data supports advanced segmentation, too. Mailchimp found that stores using predictive segments earned twice as much revenue on average.
Beyond predictive analytics, these integrations also offer insights into your website performance to find bottlenecks in the customer journey and poor-performing pages. It can also help you determine what percentage of customers add items to their cart but don’t complete the checkout process. In addition, you can understand how your audience changes by tracking the source of your website visitors and other details about them.
Social media
Your customers are on social media, giving you a unique opportunity to communicate with them more personally. Every online store should engage in social media marketing strategies that enable them to attract more customers and influence their purchasing decisions.
Integrating your social media management software with other marketing and ecommerce applications can help streamline communications and keep messaging consistent across campaigns.
With Mailchimp integrations, ecommerce businesses can drive engagement by adding social media content to email campaigns using Canva, Facebook, and LinkedIn. You can also share social media profiles with subscribers and use those channels to drive traffic back to your website. Once there, Mailchimp’s Site Tracking Pixel can collect first-party behavioral data about how visitors interact with your site.
Customer support software: Live chat and help desk
As an online retailer, you must think about all the various ways customers will communicate with your business online. When customers are shopping online, they want to be able to seamlessly contact your business if they have questions or concerns.
Customer support software, which includes live chat and help desk integration, can help you effectively serve your customers whether you sell physical or digital products.
Live chat ecommerce integrations allow your customer support agents to connect with customers immediately and in real time to improve the overall customer experience. This direct channel helps you serve your customers more efficiently, improves internal processes, and reduces the time it takes to solve issues.
Choosing the right ecommerce business integrations
Whether you sell products or services online, integrations can help streamline internal and external processes. This helps improve the overall customer experience and makes it easier for you and your employees to accomplish more in a single day. They can also improve your marketing, customer support, and inventory management practices, helping you grow your business.
Here are a few tips for choosing the right integrations for your ecommerce company:
Assess your business needs and goals
Before using integrations, you should assess your business needs and goals. Every ecommerce site needs a payment processing system.
However, does your particular ecommerce site also need to integrate with other marketing tools like email marketing software, CRMs, social media, and other sales tools? If so, list all the ways you want your marketing applications to communicate with each other to ensure you have data synchronized across channels.
For instance, with ecommerce integrations from Mailchimp, you can connect marketing and sales data to drive more traffic using Shopify, WooCommerce, BigCommerce, and Squarespace.
These integrations also enable you to encourage repeat purchases with post-purchase flows recommending complementary products and promo codes. This is just a single example of how your email marketing software can integrate with your website to drive performance and sustainable growth.
Research available ecommerce integration options
After assessing your needs, you can research the available ecommerce integration options available to you. If you’re a Mailchimp user, visit our integrations Marketplace to find integrations that can help improve your marketing campaigns and measure their performance.
When browsing ecommerce integrations, consider the software you already use. In most cases, there’s no reason to change software providers just because it integrates with your website or email marketing platform. Mailchimp offers several different types of integrations, including:
- Platform-to-platform: These integrations enable real-time data sharing between applications.
- “Powered by Mailchimp”: These integrations augment Mailchimp’s native capabilities, allowing Mailchimp to manage platform actions via integration, and you, as the user, only need to access Mailchimp to see the data.
- White-labeled solutions: White-labeled solutions augment with Mailchimp’s native capabilities and appear as a native feature within our platform.
- Mailchimp extensions: With extensions, you can purchase integrations or third-party extensions and install them within Mailchimp to act as an add-on.
Evaluate customer reviews and feedback
You can read reviews about integrations in the Marketplace or find feedback online from existing customers. Ecommerce integrations should provide you with an extension of a particular application. You can integrate your social media channels with your CRM and schedule posts directly instead of logging into each social media channel every day.
To ensure the integration is what you’re looking for, you should learn everything you can about it. The integration you choose will be based on the applications you’re already using. If you’re already using Stripe, search for its integration to learn how it works and determine whether it’s the right option for your business.
What are the steps for successful integration?
Integrating applications to improve your marketing strategy can be a long process. Ultimately, you have to decide the best way to integrate various apps to ensure you can sync data across channels and systems. Here are a few steps to ensure your integrations are successful and help your business grow:
Step #1: Assess your existing systems
Make a list of all the systems that need to be integrated. This might include applications like inventory management software, payment processors, customer data from various marketing channels, and so forth.
Next, check whether these systems work with the integrations you want to use. Look at compatibility, available features, and what data each integration can share.
Older systems may not support newer integrations or work well with the rest of your tech stack. If this is the case, you may need to update or replace some of your existing technology.
Step #2: Set up accounts and configure integrations
Once you’ve chosen the integrations you want to use, you can set up accounts and begin configuring them. If you already use a specific technology, you won’t have to set up an account again. Instead, you’ll sign into your account during configuration to begin using the integration’s features.
Review what information the integration shares between platforms. Depending on the integration, this might include customer information, order data, or purchase history. Check your settings to make sure the right data syncs and turn on the features you need. For example, you might need to turn on double opt-in to send abandoned cart text messages.
Step #3: Test and troubleshoot
When integrating your website and marketing tools with other applications, you should test and troubleshoot them if you run into problems. Mailchimp makes it easier to integrate your website and email marketing campaigns with other marketing and sales tools to grow your business online. However, it’s important to test your campaigns to ensure they’re working properly.
Start by checking that customer and order data syncs correctly across your systems. Then, test a basic automation, such as an order confirmation. Once that works, test longer automated sequences to confirm each message triggers when it should. Testing your personalized automations helps you catch problems before they affect customers and, as a result, earn more revenue.
Overcoming challenges in ecommerce integrations
Ecommerce integrations can streamline business operations, but they can also create challenges when systems don’t work together as expected. Issues with data syncing, compatibility, security, or setup can slow down your workflows. Knowing what to expect can help you avoid common problems.
Compatibility issues
Many businesses use outdated applications and tech to run their businesses. Unfortunately, legacy systems may be incompatible with newer applications, so they won’t integrate. This can prevent data from syncing properly or limit the features you can use.
To avoid that, check compatibility requirements before choosing a new integration. If your systems aren’t compatible, look for available updates or other integration options before replacing your existing technology. Once connected, test the integration to confirm data moves between your systems as expected.
Data synchronization and accuracy
Ecommerce integrations can cause quality issues with duplicate or inaccurate data. Your business gets data from multiple sources, including your CRM, email marketing software, lead gen and sales tools, customer service, and so much more. If you’re not managing this data properly, integrations can lead to duplicate or inconsistent data.
The best way to avoid inaccuracies in your data is to properly train any staff members relying on manual entry. Hopefully, you’re using technology that helps you avoid manual entry and the human error that comes with it, but mistakes can happen.
If you integrate customer data from multiple sources, you might see duplicate customer data in your system, which can cause you to send emails twice. Email marketing programs like Mailchimp safeguard against this to help you more effectively manage your email lists. But it’s crucial to pay close attention to the data you sync.
Security concerns
Ecommerce sites are at an increased risk of security breaches because they operate online. There are potential security concerns when integrating multiple applications.
Ultimately, you want to make sure any software and integrations you use are safe, especially when dealing with customer data. The more places you store customer data, the more opportunities hackers have to steal personal information like credit card numbers.
The best way to avoid security concerns is to only use software you trust. You should choose a payment gateway provider that allows data encryption that protects customer data.
Unlock your company’s full potential with ecommerce integrations
The right tech stack can help your business succeed in a competitive ecommerce marketplace by increasing customer engagement, managing customer relationships, and improving efficiency.
Running a successful online store isn’t easy. But integrations can help you accomplish more by syncing data across multiple channels, streamlining workflows, and automating tasks, helping your business scale.
The right integrations can improve the customer experience throughout their journey by improving inventory management, marketing, and sales processes. Visit the Mailchimp Integration Marketplace today to find the best custom integrations for your online business.
Frequently asked questions
Can Mailchimp track revenue from ecommerce integrations?
Yes. Mailchimp can track revenue once you connect a supported ecommerce store, such as Shopify, WooCommerce, and BigCommerce. Using an automated attribution model, Mailchimp credits each sale to the last qualifying email or text interaction within the attribution window. Reports show net revenue, so taxes and shipping won’t inflate your numbers.
Can ecommerce retailers change Mailchimp’s revenue attribution window?
You can customize Mailchimp’s attribution windows to better match your customer journey. By default, Mailchimp tracks purchases for 5 days after an email open and 30 days after an email click. For texts, the defaults are 12 hours after delivery and 5 days after a link click. You can adjust these windows in your attribution settings.
How much does the Mailchimp API or a plan with integrations cost?
You don’t have to pay a separate fee to use the Mailchimp API. You can use it with the free plan, but if you want to send transactional emails, you’ll need a standard plan or higher. Paid plan costs depend on your contact count and send volume, but they come with advanced features. Some integrations may also have separate fees.
How do ecommerce integrations help track SMS and email marketing ROI?
Ecommerce integrations connect your sales and marketing data, helping you measure return on investment (ROI). Mailchimp uses tracking information to connect purchases to specific campaigns. Keep in mind that Mailchimp’s revenue totals may be different from your ecommerce platform because it only attributes qualifying orders to specific campaigns.
What ROI can ecommerce brands get with Mailchimp?
Ecommerce retailers using paid Mailchimp plans can see up to 30x ROI when they connect their store. Mailchimp users with Shopify-connected accounts can see returns of up to $41 for every $1 spent. Ecommerce brands using text marketing can also see up to 22 times ROI after launching their first SMS campaign.
How can integrations help recover lost sales from abandoned carts?
Ecommerce integrations can use cart activity to trigger an abandoned cart recovery flow. A 3-email flow might send a reminder within an hour. A second email can offer free shipping after 24 hours, while a third can create urgency after 72 hours with a low-stock alert. With 70% of carts abandoned before checkout, this flow can help recover lost revenue.