Here are some tips and real life examples to get you moving confidently in the right direction

1. White Paper Series:
Ecommerce
successful integration
Tips to try
journey
and traps
to avoid
for a
ECOMMERCE INTEGRATION
Tips to try and traps to avoid for
a successful integration journey

2. Table of Contents Introduction
• Introduction Your competition is not sitting still. And neither should you.
The reality is that companies with first-generation
• Where are you today? ecommerce solutions built with myriad legacy and point
product solutions – as well as those with no ecommerce
• Internal factors that presence at all – must implement a robust, fully integrated
can stymie your ecommerce presence to remain competitive.
project
At the same time, your customers are increasingly reaching
for smartphones and tablets to make their online purchases.
• The right approach to Are you ready?
back-office integration
Without a doubt, ecommerce integration can be complex.
But with the right planning and execution, you can avoid
• 3 steps to success
many of the common issues and costly mistakes.
• 3 case studies Here are some tips and real life examples to get you moving
confidently in the right direction.
• Summary
www.osf-global.com © 2013 by OSF Global Services. All rights Reserved. Page 1

3. Take a realistic look at where you And research conducted by Adobe® reveals that
each tablet visitor is four times as likely to
are today: it’s a balancing act
purchase and spends over 50% more per
The ecommerce terrain is changing fast, driven purchase than smartphone visitors.5
largely by radical shifts in consumer
expectations, ubiquitous social networks and
multiple sales channels.
448 million
In fact consumers’ rapid adoption of mobile and
mobile payment users
tablets alone is enough to keep any e-retailer
awake at night. For instance Gartner predicts
in a market worth $617 billion
that in 2016 there will be 448 million mobile
payment users in a market worth $617 billion.1 Tablet visitors are 4 times
more likely to purchase;
In Europe a 2012 survey conducted by
and spend over 50% more
Rackspace of UK smartphone and tablet owners
than smartphone visitors
reveals that mobile is helping to drive an
increase in impulse buying, particularly for
clothes and music.2 30% of consumers
use more than
Meanwhile France's mobile commerce market 3 commerce channels to
more than doubled, achieving EUR 1 billion in research and make a purchase
2012 versus EUR 400 million a year earlier.3
German consumers are moving toward mobile
shopping but are concerned by the lack of In the U.S. 22% of consumers with mobile
mobile optimized sites. devices spend $50 or more per month shopping
from their tablet and 9% of them spend $100 or
As for tablets, today they generate a small more, which is much higher than the spending
portion of total website visits. But according to levels of smartphone owners.
market intelligence firm ABI Research nearly 200
million tablets have shipped worldwide since Also studies show that 30% of consumers use
2009 and an additional 1 billion tablets are more than three commerce channels to research
4
forecasted to ship over the next 5 years. an item and make a purchase.6
www.osf-global.com © 2013 by OSF Global Services. All rights Reserved. Page 2

4. And when Independent Fashion Bloggers (IFB) At the opposite end of the spectrum, we see
conducted an online poll in late 2012, a clients who continually postpone integrations
whopping 71% of respondents said yes, social because they think it will be too complicated.
7
media does influence their online purchases.
Yes, your ecommerce ecosystem is complicated.
Here’s the conundrum: can your current But integration is mandatory if you intend to
technology platform and supporting systems remain competitive, increase operational
scale to support an exponentially growing, efficiency and exceed your customers’ online
complex array of consumer touch points? And shopping expectations.
can you do it in a sustainable way?
Pinpoint internal factors that can
Ironically the more orders you have coming in
stymie your integration project
via your webstore, the more noticeable your lack
from the get-go
of integration becomes – because applications
are disconnected, too many steps are being As you initiate conversations regarding your
completed manually. company’s ecommerce integration plans, note
that numerous internal factors can have a
This increases the opportunity for human error sizeable impact on your integration efforts.
and delays service management, which can
result in an unhappy customer, lost sale and/or Identify those factors early on to help avoid
bad publicity. scope creep, cost overruns and the derailment
of your ecommerce integration journey. For
So you have a balancing act on your hands. example:
• You’re trying to enhance the customer Get executive buy-in and support from all
experience while also trying to ensure that stakeholders
your business operations are reliable and
running smoothly. The truth is passive commitment from the
• And you are often tackling these challenges executive team can halt momentum on your
with reduced staffs or smaller budgets. ecommerce integration projects.
It’s no surprise then that some retailers jump Yes, they may have signed off on funding; but
into ecommerce integrations, lured by the then they moved on to the next crisis or
promise of a quick fix plug-in. business opportunity that demanded their
attention, leaving your ecommerce integration
project to stagnate.
www.osf-global.com © 2013 by OSF Global Services. All rights Reserved. Page 3

5. Without visible, proactive executive sponsorship, If it’s broken, integration isn’t going to fix it. In
it’s more difficult to gain and maintain fact, NOT fixing these problems first is going to
consensus among stakeholders. cost you more down the road.
Build the right team Take a realistic approach to integration
Determine early on which stakeholders should Many e-businesses have grown up through an
be involved in the integration planning. IT and arbitrary combination of point products – each
customer support are a given. purchased or custom-built independently with
little thought given to consistent, scalable
But which other departments, divisions or enterprise architecture. Frequently the result is
business units have a vested interest? Is it layers of applications running on different
finance? Sales? Marketing? What about your platforms.
trading partners?
And if your e-business began as bricks and
Keep the human factor in mind mortar, those original backend systems probably
were not purchased with ecommerce in mind,
Don’t underestimate the human aspect of the
let alone integration with social networks and
changes that are inevitable with ecommerce
mobile devices.
integration.
Maybe those applications are running on
For instance if you make changes to the current
mainframes. Or maybe your company has
workflow, what’s the impact on employees
acquired another ecommerce business, and that
who’ve been following the same processes for
company has a different set of systems and
years? Will they have input to a new process?
processes. Sound familiar?
And how and when will they be trained on the
new process? When it comes to ecommerce cross-channel
technology ecosystems, there is no easy fix, no
Fix what needs fixing first
plug-and-play.
Poorly written code, weak infrastructure, fuzzy
Instead your ultimate goal should be to
processes, poor documentation, hacked up
implement a service-oriented architecture (SOA)
software and faulty shortcuts must be addressed
that supports connectivity across your webstore,
and fixed before you begin any integration
your backend applications, multiple sales
activity.
channels and your trading partners.
www.osf-global.com © 2013 by OSF Global Services. All rights Reserved. Page 4

6. And that requires fanatical planning and This custom layer serves as the communication
meticulous execution. intermediary by exposing a Web service
interface to the application.
The right approach to back-office
For example, if your legacy applications were
integration
running on a mainframe, a custom layer would
Back-office integration presents a great hide the mainframe and legacy systems. Then
opportunity to take a hard look at your those web service APIs talk to any third-party
applications and business processes – and to application. In other words, this custom layer
make the needed changes. can facilitate the integration of data from legacy
Integrating Legacy Backend Systems
Migrate over time, don’t rip and replace
Source: OSF Global Services
That’s not to say you should suddenly rip out sources, such as your ERP, with modern
your legacy applications. Clearly that would be payment processing systems, content
costly and highly destructive to your business. management systems, and so on.
Instead you want to enable your legacy That means integration between your
applications to communicate with modern ecommerce solution and backend systems can
systems through custom integration layers, be done in phases with workarounds that ensure
often described as “wrappers.” your e-business continues to operate without
www.osf-global.com © 2013 by OSF Global Services. All rights Reserved. Page 5

7. disruption and allow a smooth change out of customer orders to real-time pricing updates in
legacy systems over time. your ERP, product catalog and storefront. And it
goes beyond technology. Successful data
This in turn helps reduce risks because you
synchronization includes data quality and data
control the rate of change and it enables you to
accuracy.
budget over multiple quarters.
For instance if accurate product data is not
3 steps to successful ecommerce synchronized between your ERP, order
integration management system, warehouse and trading
partners, you risk excess inventory, inaccurate
To guide you in your journey toward a more pricing, manual reconciliation of invoices and
agile and profitable e-business, consider taking unhappy customers who can’t track the status of
these three critical steps along the way: their orders.
Step 1: Look at your entire e-business If up-to-date customer data is not synchronized
holistically. This includes applications, between your webstore, ERP and CRM systems,
infrastructure, staffing resources and trading you won’t be able to see order histories and
partners. demand patterns of each customer. This means
you lose the opportunity to offer additional
Successful ecommerce requires real-time access
product recommendations or personalized
to product information, customer information
promotions.
and supply chain information. That’s why your
technologies need to be scalable. But always keep this in mind: automating
existing processes without first making
Platform compatibility can be an issue. So make
necessary improvements to workflow will not
sure you understand your architecture before
yield the results you want. In fact, you’ll just be
you begin to integrate existing applications to
wasting time, money and resources.
avoid disruption or data loss – and especially
before you begin to evaluate the purchase of So clearly document and test your current
any new applications. workflow processes, then make the necessary
improvements before you move forward with
Step 2: Know that data synchronization is synchronization.
fundamental to ecommerce success.
Synchronized data means that most – if not all – Typically we advise implementing workflow
of the behind the scenes data sharing takes projects in phases because it reduces business
place in real time … from real-time processing of disruption and provides visible, successive
www.osf-global.com © 2013 by OSF Global Services. All rights Reserved. Page 6

8. improvements to your ecommerce processes. 3 case studies: ecommerce
Sometimes that visibility is required in order to
integration done right
continue to motivate employees whose long-
held routines might be changing. COMPANY SNAPSHOT “A”: This mid-sized
enterprise provides white-labeled technology
Step 3: Automate as many interactions as
services through a multi-tenant service delivery
possible. This is especially relevant if your
platform. Each of its customer’s must be fully
current mode of operation is to pull different
branded and have a unique configuration.
pieces of information from the different people
Everything from the ecommerce storefront to
who are responsible for different aspects of your
the CRM and card processing must be
ecommerce business.
customizable and branded.
Your goal is to streamline the flow of data
between systems – then consolidate that data Plus each tenant has different integration points
via a single user interface (UI) so it can be – for example different fulfillment systems and
compared and analyzed in a consistent way. multiple card processor systems. And of course
Otherwise you risk making critical operating each tenant demands a consistent user
decisions based on flawed or incomplete experience regardless of the sales channels.
information.
Ecommerce integration solution: The
Obviously data from multiple files will be in company chose a custom-built SaaS-based
different formats. But there are a number of delivery platform. Then the third-party systems
master data management (MDM) tools on the as well as the legacy systems were consolidated.
market to help you centralize all of that data
into a single user interface. In this case, taking the SaaS route enabled the
solution to work off a common code base yet
Then you’ll have real-time access to the key
still allow for the customization required by each
data that’s driving your e-business, which means
tenant.
you can respond quickly to changes – which
ultimately can help you reduce costs, improve
The result? Predictable scaling to take
the customer experience and increase customer
advantage of market opportunities and seasonal
loyalty.
demand; plus, all the needed applications are
integrated, including service management, CRM,
ERP and multiple card processing and billing
platforms.
www.osf-global.com © 2013 by OSF Global Services. All rights Reserved. Page 7

9. COMPANY SNAPSHOT “B”: This ecommerce But they had reached the point where those
company needed a real-time integration system processes needed to be automated and
for fulfillment and order management, but some applications needed to be integrated, or the
orders come direct from end customers, others company risked losing credibility with its
come through third parties. customers.
Further complicating the process is that some Ecommerce integration solution: First the
orders are shipped directly to end customers front end of the ecommerce platform was
while others go to the third parties for future customized. Then the platform was integrated
distribution – and that requires different price with the company’s key applications, including
points depending on purchase quantity and CRM, fulfillment, card processing, email and lead
shipment location. generation tools.
Ecommerce integration solution: The This created a fully integrated backend platform
company’s ecommerce platform underwent for order fulfillment and invoice processing. By
significant customization, including assigning automating its critical processes, the company
different rules for each sales channel as well as reduced delivery times, improved tracking
custom workflows. capabilities, increased customer satisfaction and
decreased costs.
Then their multiple applications were seamlessly
integrated with the ecommerce platform,
Summary
including fulfillment, order management, credit
card processing, CRM and marketing automation
The key message here is this: ecommerce
tools.
integration is complex and time consuming, but
it is essential to delivering the nimbleness
COMPANY SNAPSHOT “C”: This rapidly
required to grow your business, drive innovation
growing service company found itself with
across channels, and differentiate your brand in
disconnected workflows that were affecting
the ever-changing world of ecommerce.
order fulfillment, invoice processing and
customer satisfaction.
While it is easy to get caught up in the fanfare
of marketing hype or vendors who promise a
During the company’s initial growth spurt,
quick fix, remember the old adage, “If it sounds
different departments had adapted various tools
too good to be true...”
and manual processes.
www.osf-global.com © 2013 by OSF Global Services. All rights Reserved. Page 8

10. Instead seek out a multi-disciplined integration Then follow these tips and you will be well on
partner to supplement your internal staff. Be our way to a successful journey.
sure the service provider is experienced in
solving ecommerce business issues similar to 1. Get executive buy-in and support from all
stakeholders
those you are facing, including working with
backend applications and legacy systems like 2. Build your project team
those deployed in your ecommerce ecosystem. 3. Define your requirements
4. Document your processes
The partner’s expertise in business processes,
integration strategies and technology 5. Decide which applications to integrate in
which order
implementation across multi-channel touch
points should alleviate much of the angst that 6. Roll out the integration in phases
might otherwise sidetrack your ecommerce
integration efforts.
1
Gartner report "Forecast: Mobile Payment, Worldwide, 2009-2016”
2
Vision Critical, in August 2012
3
French e-commerce association Fevad
4
Consumer Media Tablet Usage, ABI Research, 2012
5
The Impact of Tablet Visitors on Retail Websites; Adobe® Digital Marketing Insights, 2011
6
Cross-Channel Commerce: A Consumer Research Study; Oracle/ATG consumer survey, May 2011
7
Independent Fashion Bloggers
About the author
OSF Global Services customizes and seamlessly integrates your entire ecommerce environment, from the
front-end of an online store, which is what the customer sees, to the back-end technologies that power
what the customer experiences.
Our forte is mitigating the risks associated with platform integration and data migration, and delivering
scalable solutions that enable retailers to expand abroad, deliver a modernized online store, and create
personalized shopping experiences.
Headquartered in Quebec, Canada, OSF has offices in the US, France, Germany, Italy, UK, Romania and
Ukraine. This mix of onshore and offshore expertise allows us to provide comprehensive, follow-the-sun
support for our clients.
For more information about our ecommerce services, please visit www.osf-commerce.com or contact us
at info@osf-global.com.
www.osf-global.com © 2013 by OSF Global Services. All rights Reserved. Page 9