E-commerce QuickBooks Integration
People who are neck deep in the e-commerce game know the struggle. Managing customer information, keeping inventories up to date, tracking sales, shipping packages… this list seems endless.
And that’s just with a single sales channel!
If you’re selling your products and services on your website and are also taking advantage of the billions of dollars’ worth of revenue up for grabs on Amazon or eBay, the amount of data you need to dig through to run your business effectively can be suffocating.
Still, with over 3 billion people accessing the internet today, the volume of sales made online are set to speed up, not slow down.
How are you supposed to keep up?
Fortunately, if you are like millions of businesses leveraging QuickBooks to manage your inventory and finances, you could be automatically sharing information from your e-commerce platforms with your QuickBooks account.
You read that right!
Your QuickBooks can act as a central location from which you can import and reference important pieces of sales information as well as export data to make sure your e-commerce platforms are adorning your customers with painstakingly accurate product information.
Now that we have your mouth watering, without further ado, here is an overview of the top 3 benefits that e-commerce QuickBooks integration can bring to your business.
1) Integration Means Happy Customers
When your customers are smiling, your revenue is usually doing its “happy dance.” You know, that beautiful, upward zigzagging motion it does toward the upper right corner of sales reports?
On the flip side, when your customers are frowning, your revenue is usually dancing in a more… depressing direction. Also, people are probably saying things about your business on review sites they likely wouldn’t repeat in front of their grandma.
The point is “keeping your customers happy” = “good things happening,” and integrating e-commerce with QuickBooks is the engine that drives that equation.
With e-commerce QuickBooks integration, you crush the possibility of errors because you don’t have to worry about manually transferring data between platforms.
You can be sure your inventory levels are always correct, meaning no sending embarrassing emails to customers telling them you oversold your inventory and need to cancel their orders. You can also confidently ship products without worrying about incorrectly copying addressees, which reduces the risk of your law firm, for example, accidentally express mailing divorce papers to the wrong married couple (talk about an awkward dinner conversation).
It used to be that when you made mistakes with customers they would give you two or three chances before they packed up and took their business elsewhere. Today, e-commerce gives customers access to hundreds of thousands of stores at the click of a button. Because of this immediacy, you run the risk of losing a customer and the lifetime value they represent with a single slip up.
E-commerce QuickBooks integration protects you from those kinds of costly errors.
2) Integration Means Efficiency Boosts for You and Your Team
“Time is money.”
Sorry to hit you with that clichéd Benjamin Franklin quote that every Johnny-come-lately writing about business knocks you over the head with, but the quote holds up! Especially regarding e-commerce QuickBooks integration.
When you’re manually syncing data across multiple sales channels, the opportunity costs involved are huge!
You could instead be spending your day developing your marketing strategy, personally responding to customer concerns, researching new products or automating your sales funnels. That list just grazes the surface of better ways you could be spending your time!
As a rule of thumb, if you’re running a business and are doing things anyone with a brain and two hands could do, you are losing money. Now our intent here isn’t to sound facetious. Our team totally gets that when running a small business, you need to bootstrap your processes and wear different hats to make it through the day.
Still, the key to scaling is delegating, and with QuickBooks, you can delegate hours’ worth of data-related work with nominal effort up-front. That time saved frees you up to invest yourself in things that can really fuel the growth of your business.
3) Integration Means Bigger Margins
At the end of the day, any improvements you make to your business processes will come down to one thing. What does the return on investment look like?
With e-commerce QuickBooks integration, the return on investment could mean thousands of dollars every year.
From a time perspective, if an employee is managing the manual transporting of your data, letting QuickBooks integrations do the heavy lifting means less billable hours. You can trim your workforce and help your business operate leaner.
From the perspective of accuracy, mistakes cost money. We talked a little bit about losing customers as a result of errors, but even if you don’t lose a customer, needing to do things like absorbing additional shipping charges because you miss-ship a product or offering store credit as a “make good” for delays can mean incremental spending that adds up to something massive at the end of the year.
More accuracy in less time means more revenue.
What Platforms Can You Integrate with QuickBooks?
By now we’re hoping we’ve sold you on the idea that e-commerce QuickBooks integration is a good thing. After all, we’re willing to bet that happy customers, more time in your day and more money in your pocket are all pretty powerful motivators.
The next question is, what e-commerce platforms integrate with QuickBooks?
Answering that question would be a whole article in itself. For now, we'll tell you that through QuickBooks’ native functionality and the 3rd party applications and extensions available to you, you can integrate QuickBooks with just about every major e-commerce product on the market today.
So, rest assured, if you’re making sales on Amazon or eBay, you can set yourself up right now to enjoy the benefits of gathering sales information from those platforms and exporting inventory information to them.
Also, if you’re selling on your personal website, depending on the e-commerce tool you’re using to manage your checkout process, you can expect to be able to sync your data with QuickBooks.
Our personal favorite e-commerce tool to use for managing website sales is WooCommerce. WooCommerce is a flexible checkout plug-in you can integrate into your WordPress site. It’s 100% customizable with its robust extensions and it fully integrates with QuickBooks.
Wrapping Up Integrating E-commerce with QuickBooks
The world of e-commerce is moving quickly and is set to speed up as more of the world’s population gets online. One of the biggest barriers between you and selling your products at the speed of the internet is data management.
Data is generated from every sale you make, every customer you reel in, every package you ship and more. If you’re manually syncing all that data to your QuickBooks account, you are wasting valuable time and leaving yourself open to the costly liability of making mistakes.
With the deep e-commerce integration features QuickBooks enables you to take advantage of, you can set and forget all of your data-management-related tasks and invest your efforts in your business’ future, not its day-to-day maintenance.
Bottom line, if you want to improve your customer experience with less effort and reliably grow your revenue, integrating e-commerce with QuickBooks is something you should start doing today!
At Viral Solutions we are committed to seeing YOU succeed. It is our goal to grow your business with proven digital marketing strategies that will help your business for the long haul.
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