There are a number of CRMs in the marketplace. Zoho is specifically designed for small and mid-sized businesses. Zoho is a multichannel CRM software that helps businesses engage clients, automate the sales process, and close deals faster.

Both Zoho and SAP Business One help your business run more efficiently, but if the two systems do not speak to each other—if they are not integrated—the benefits are limited. Until recently, integration has been an expensive and challenging task, requiring months of work by external consultants. Alluvia has developed an automated integration tool that connects SAP Business One and Zoho rapidly, and at a price that companies of all size can afford.

Why bother integrating SAP Business One and Zoho?

SAP Business One and Zoho integration enables your business to:

• Synchronize data—The most up-to-date customer and account information is always available in both systems. Synchronization is needed for:
  • Accounts Sync
  • Contacts
  • Orders
  • Products
  • Quotes
  • Inventory
  • Price Books
• Eliminate manual data entry—Manually entering data into each system results in duplicate entries and errors. Automated integration avoids common mistakes such as duplications and incorrect or missing entries.

• Provide real-time information—Sales agents and customer service reps always have access to the latest information. They can provide faster and more reliable service to customers and prospects and close more deals.

• Optimize business processes—SAP Business One brings resource planning, analytical tools, scheduling and reporting features, and resource tracking to your Zoho CRM system. Integrating these two systems creates and enhances efficiencies in business processes.

• Shorten the sales cycle and response time—The efficiencies that come with integration shorten the sales cycle and the time it takes customer service to respond to requests. Issues are resolved faster and sales can be made more quickly, enabling agents to move on to the next prospect.

The new approach: Automated integration from Alluvia

Traditional integration services are expensive and time-consuming. Projects can drag on for several months and cost thousands of dollars. As your needs change, additional consulting work is needed, costing more money and slowing your operations down as you wait for work to be performed.

The roadblocks of time and cost have often prevented many small and medium-sized businesses from integrating SAP Business One and Zoho. Now there is a new alternative: automated integration of SAP Business One and Zoho.

Alluvia developed a cloud-based integration tool with the following features:

• Affordability—Alluvia is available for a low one-time setup fee per template. After setup is complete, businesses only pay for the synchronizations they need, with pricing starting as low as $79 per month.

• Speed and ease of use—A drag-and-drop mapping wizard with pre-built templates allows you to match your data elements to Zoho in less than a day.

• Low maintenance requirements—A cloud-based solution means no software or IT maintenance requirements.

• Intuitive interface—Changes and updates are simple and can be done in-house.

SAP Business One and Zoho integration is essential if you want to unlock the true potential of these two systems. Now that automated integration is available, businesses of all sizes can benefit from having their ERP and CRM systems work together so operations are optimized and efficient.

When selecting a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system, it is important to understand what your needs are as an organization.

Too often, price drives the purchasing decision. But this can result in a system that won’t meet all of your needs.

Just spending more isn’t the answer, either. To end up getting full value from your CRM, the decision should be driven by your business needs. Are you looking to derive certain efficiencies in business processes from the CRM system? Or do you have expectations as to how it will help you grow your business? Knowing the answers to these and other questions can help you identify the real value you hope to gain from a CRM system.

A recent post from Salesforce provides a value hierarchy, consisting of Innovation, Business Growth, and Operational Efficiency, that will help you choose the right CRM system for your company’s goals and situation.

Mobile commerce sales continue to rise, making m-commerce an increasingly important piece of your overall ecommerce business.

You need to optimize your ecommerce store for mobile use, including support for mobile search and checkout.

But how do you know if you’re doing it right? There are key metrics you can measure to determine where you should stay the course and where you may need to make some adjustments. This article provides a closer look at five metrics that are important to monitor for mobile commerce success in 2018. The article looks at the bounce rate and refusal rate, the dropout rate, page views, the conversion rate into a page, and push notification opt-ins. It provides a brief overview of each and why they are important to m-commerce success.

Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) and Customer Relationship Management (CRM) systems are two of the most common systems used by organizations to improve business efficiencies.

One ERP system that has been steadily growing in popularity over the past few years is SAP Business One, and it is steadily evolving into a business process platform. When it comes to CRM systems, Salesforce is the leading solution and was named the #1 CRM provider by International Data Corporation for four consecutive years. Salesforce was also named Editor’s Choice and among the top three picks for the best CRM software for 2018 by PC Magazine.

But to optimize these two systems, they must be integrated so information is automatically synchronized. Unfortunately, SAP Business One and Salesforce integration has often been a challenging process, requiring outside time and resources beyond what most medium-sized businesses can afford.

The good news is that Alluvia has developed a revolutionary tool that removes the common barriers in terms of the time and cost typically associated with Salesforce integration. Seeing the difference between the traditional way and Alluvia’s revolutionary approach to achieving Salesforce integration helps businesses understand how truly simple and affordable ERP CRM integration can be.  

SAP Business One and Salesforce: Why integrate?

Before diving into the details around integration options, it is helpful to understand the many benefits of integration. SAP Business One and Salesforce integration enables organizations to:

• Synchronize data – New or updated customer information, product information, quotes, and prospect/lead information are synced between SAP Business One and Salesforce, with all customer and account information available in both systems.
• Eliminate manual data entry – No more duplicates or double entries; reduce the possibility of data entry errors.
• Provide information real-time – Information is available immediately, empowering sales reps and customer service reps to act on the right information quickly.
• Optimize business processes – SAP Business One brings resource planning, analytical tools, scheduling and reporting features, and resource tracking to your Salesforce CRM system. Integrating these two systems creates efficiencies in business processes.
• Reduce sales cycle and response time – The efficiencies that come with integration shorten the sales cycle and the time it takes customer service to respond to requests. Reps have immediate access to the latest information so they can respond to questions and issues faster.

To stay competitive, organizations need to get the most out of these powerful ERP and CRM solutions, making integration essential. But until recently, this has not been a simple endeavor.

Common challenges when integrating SAP Business One and Salesforce

Traditional integration services are expensive and time-consuming. Projects typically drag on for several weeks or months. Worse yet, they can run into the thousands or even tens of thousands of dollars.

As your business and associated systems grow, additional consulting work is required to further customize your integration. Changes or updates often require skilled developers. This means more development time and more money out of your pocket.

The time and cost of the traditional approach to Salesforce integration has been an obstacle for businesses for some time now. While the many benefits of integration are clear, organizations simply cannot afford these costly integration solutions. They also do not want to miss out on new opportunities while waiting for consultants to develop a custom integration. Alluvia saw this challenge and committed to creating a solution.

Alluvia solutions

It took time and dedication, but Alluvia remained steadfast to its commitment to an affordable and simple Salesforce integration solution. The barriers have been removed, with Alluvia solutions offering the following features and advantages:

• Affordability – Alluvia is available for a low one-time setup fee per template, with accounts and contacts synchronization offered for only $39 per month.
• Speed and ease of use – Drag-and-drop mapping wizard with pre-built templates allows businesses to match their data elements to Salesforce in less than a day.
• Complete Salesforce support – Alluvia supports the following Salesforce objects:
  • Salesforce accounts sync
  • Salesforce contacts
  • Salesforce products
  • Salesforce quotes
  • Salesforce orders
  • Salesforce Price Books
  • Salesforce Custom Objects
• Low maintenance requirements – A cloud-based solution means no software or IT maintenance requirements.
• Intuitive interface – Changes and updates can be done in-house by regular staff with the simple interface.

Integrating SAP Business One and Salesforce is a necessary step for businesses that want to unlock their true potential, creating efficiencies and saving time and resources. But in the past, many of these benefits have been outweighed by the sheer cost and time required to establish integration. With Alluvia’s solutions, integration can be set up in less than a day at a price that will not eat into your bottom line, making SAP Business One and Salesforce integration a painless process with an immediate ROI.

The holiday season is a huge opportunity for online retailers to close out the year with a bang, and 2017 was no exception. In fact, holiday retail sales had the highest growth rate since 2011, fueled by an 18.1% increase in online sales.

Ecommerce hit another milestone during Cyber Week of 2017, with Thanksgiving day delivering the highest year-over-year increase in gross merchandise volume (GMV). But you can’t take advantage of these sales without ecommerce integration, making now the time to craft an ecommerce integration plan so you can generate more revenue this year. Fortunately, there is a new data integration solution available to ensure you capitalize on not only the end-of-year holiday retail blitz, but also on other busy times for ecommerce throughout the year.

Ecommerce integration involves connecting your ERP system with any of a number of ecommerce or marketplace platforms. One ERP system that  is gaining popularity is SAP Business One, and traditionally, integration can have its share of challenges. Advances in integration technology have been made, however, revolutionizing the process. New data integration solutions now make it easier and more affordable to accomplish SAP Business One integration with Shopify, WooCommerce, Magento, and any of the other ecommerce and marketplace platforms available today.

To fully understand the difference between the traditional approach to ecommerce integration and revolutionary integration, let’s take a closer look at the steps associated with each. As you become educated on the new data integration solutions available, you can develop a plan to optimize the ecommerce explosion – regardless of the season.

Traditional SAP Business One integration

Whether your goal is SAP Business One integration with WooCommerce, Magento, Shopify, or another platform, the traditional approach to integration is basically the same. While there may be some slight variations in the timeline, cost, or terminology used, the scenario often goes like this:

• The customer reaches out to one or more vendors for a quote.
• Vendors submit proposals outlining the services to be provided.
• Proposals are reviewed, and once selected, a traditional vendor will have you sign a contract with them for the data integration services to be provided.
• Upon contract signing, a kick-off meeting is held to outline the full details of the SAP Business One integration and a start date is scheduled.
• Custom consulting work, performed by a small team of 2-5 professionals, is performed to complete SAP Business One integration with your custom files. This typically spans anywhere from 4 – 8 weeks (and oftentimes longer than that), with consulting rates averaging $150 per hour.
• Total costs typically include a large one-time fee that can run into the tens of thousands of dollars. Annual licensing renewal fees are also part of the traditional cost model.
• Any additional consulting work required beyond install – updates required based on marketplace platform changes for example – are charged at the agreed-upon hourly consulting rate.
• Revolutionary SAP Business One integration
• A new data integration solution can achieve SAP Business One integration in a more timely and straightforward manner. With revolutionary integration, the scenario is as follows:
• The customer hears about a new approach to data integration, and reaches out to Alluvia for more information.
• No contract is required, and with the setup cost under $100, you decide to give it a try.
• A small utility is installed on your local server, while core functionality and business logic are processed by a cloud-computing engine.
• Using an intuitive mapping wizard in a drag-and-drop interface, you (not a consultant) match data elements in real-time, setting up ecommerce and marketplace integration in less than a day.

Benefits of this ground-breaking approach:

• Automatic updates to platform requirements, ensuring your system is always running smoothly
• All documents required – whether it be for SAP Business One integration with Magento, Shopify, or other platform – are included. Your integration is complete for the entire order and inventory process.
• Employees can make changes to user-defined fields without the intervention of an outside consultant, keeping your costs down and your business flexible.
• Minimal maintenance is required with a cloud system, freeing up time and resources for more business-oriented tasks.
• Expanding to additional platforms as your business grows is just as simple and cost-effective, widening the possibilities for growing your business.

Be prepared for this year

If you are looking to expand your online retail sales into new ecommerce and marketplace platforms, set your sights on the 2018 holiday season now. It is never too early to start planning for the holiday season (and other retail-rich events at other times of the year), and while most retailers get deep into planning sales promotions for the holidays in the fall, your integration needs to be up and running first, making this your highest priority.

You can expect your holiday sales to kick off strong over Thanksgiving weekend and on Cyber Monday. A small lull in early to mid-December is to be expected, with another strong surge right before the holiday itself. With ecommerce sales up an estimated 16% from November to December this year, this is a sales opportunity you cannot afford to miss next year. A new, revolutionary approach to data integration makes integration possible on not only one ecommerce platform, but now makes integration on multiple platforms a real possibility.

If you weren’t already thinking about moving your ecommerce store to BigCommerce, chances are you’re reconsidering.

The ecommerce platform recently announced that its U.S.-based merchants will have access to Instagram’s shoppable posts, opening more sales opportunities. And just in time for the holiday shopping season. If you’re getting ready to bring your store to BigCommerce and need SAP Business One integration assistance (or if you’ve already integrated but are having issues), this article is here to help, with a quick outline of SAP Business One integration options, a look at some of the common issues that can arise, and what BigCommerce has to offer.

More than one way to integrate BigCommerce with SAP Business One

There are several companies in the marketplace offering services for integrating SAP Business One with BigCommerce. While they may all seem very similar, there are some key differentiators to consider when shopping around:

• Speed of setup – Most vendors will tell you they need anywhere from 6-8 weeks to get you up and running on your BigCommerce platform, but there are exceptions. New advances in cloud-based software have drastically shortened the setup time required. Alluvia has created an intuitive user interface that enables you to immediately connect to BigCommerce and automate your two-way data exchange. Pre-built templates and mapping wizards will get you set up in less than a day.
• Pricing – Most integration projects for SAP Business One and BigCommerce involve hiring a team of consultants. Projects typically run for several weeks or months, and the costs involve a hefty initial fee to purchase software or a tool, followed by an additional cost for consulting services and ongoing annual fees. You can take advantage of Alluvia’s innovative integration platform for just under $100.
• Fine Print – Don’t get stuck paying for annual fees or unnecessary and expensive consulting hours to get you up and running. And be sure to have an out – if you’re not happy with your integration provider you should be able to cancel at any time.

Avoid these pitfalls

As you think about integrating with BigCommerce, keep in mind some of these common missteps:

• Don’t try to go it alone – You may be tempted to manually run your BigCommerce store, but sooner or later you will hit a point at which this no longer becomes feasible. It ends up costing you in lost business and money. Experience shows that as you break 200 orders per month, automated integration is the way to go, and for many it is the right solution from the start. The good news is the quicker setup and cheaper cost of Alluvia makes automated integration a viable option from day one for any mid-sized business.
• Updates – Make sure your integration provider will provide automatic updates to retailer templates to keep your business running smoothly.
• Security and maintenance – Cloud-based software solutions for BigCommerce integration keep your data secure without the hefty price tag associated with hardware installation and maintenance. There are several options when it comes to a cloud-based solution, but Alluvia translates your data elements into one universal document. That means you only have to manage a single connection.

Why BigCommerce

Just a few months ago, BigCommerce announced its rise as the industry’s #1 cloud ecommerce platform for mid-market businesses. Founded in 2009, BigCommerce has a lot of similarities to Shopify, but it also includes comprehensive support, SEO, and customer segmentation. Its cloud-based solution reduces set-up time and maintenance costs, and it claims to provide the best ROI in the industry.

BigCommerce has a simple and intuitive interface with over 100 different apps and add-ons that can easily be integrated into your store. It offers one-click integrations, powerful APIs, and it doesn’t limit API calls unlike some of its competitors. The BigCommerce user-friendly platform makes it a great fit for middle-market businesses and fast-growing smaller brands, as it enables business and marketing managers to run promotions and campaigns, and change settings without technical assistance.

As you take the next steps towards integrating SAP Business One with BigCommerce, Alluvia is here to do some of the homework for you. Taking the time to learn about your options when it comes to set up time, pricing, and maintenance can save you money and make your business more successful in the long run.

Data integration solutions have come a long way since manual ledgers, punch cards, and mainframe computers.

In this article, we’ll look at the basics of how data integration software has evolved over time and how today’s powerful yet streamlined solutions are putting more power into the hands of the user.

Lots of data, all in silos

In the early days, businesses had plenty of data but it was all housed in completely different databases. Most companies had an ERP system, a separate system for reporting, one for financials, another for payroll, and so on. Their data could be sliced and diced in many different ways, which was helpful for individual departments using it, but integrating the data into useful big-picture scenarios took lots of time – and significant investment. The challenge was to get these systems to talk to one another.

The introduction of basic integration tools

Advancements in data integration software enabled systems to begin sharing information more seamlessly. Large enterprise software companies like IBM, Oracle and SAP developed massive tools to create data warehouses that could integrate information from separate databases. These ETL (“Extract, Transform, Load”) technologies were able to transform data into new structures that could be easily interpreted by other systems.

This was a huge advancement in the field of data integration. Though this technology enabled information sharing between databases, in order to make sure these systems worked reliably, someone had to write all the scripts, perform tests and validate each step of every process. The tools existed, but they were expensive, complicated, and required long development timeframes.

Opening up the communication channels

Today, new technologies have emerged that make it much easier for businesses to collect, merge and parse ever-increasing quantities of data. These platforms don’t just extract data from various databases and smash it together. They allow open, two-way communication between systems. It’s like the difference between passing notes in class and a real-time video chat connection.

These systems use modern APIs (application programming interfaces) to connect disparate systems in a trusted manner, enabling unrestricted data sharing among independently-developed software solutions.
API connections are all around us. Everything from automatically posting your tweets to your Facebook wall to connecting your eBay inventory to a Google spreadsheet requires the use of these communication tools that extract and import data for a variety of practical uses.

A new era: user-friendly, automated solutions for businesses

The data integration solutions mentioned above are primarily for small-scale consumer use – but new advancements have revolutionized business process efficiency. Data integration software companies recognize that as businesses seek to expand their sales channels, grow their audiences or increase their B2B transactions, their data must be able to keep up. Instead of complex and cumbersome tool sets, new systems are focused on providing easy-to-use solutions. These solutions are designed for implementation by users without a technical background, where speed-to-deployment is critical.

Plug-and-play integration platforms are ready to go out of the box, so no time is wasted on software development and testing. Instead, automated solutions are fully developed before reaching the end user. As such, businesses can begin using the software with a few clicks. Simple mapping processes allow users to quickly configure their connections, without any knowledge of what’s happening “under the hood.” This is a huge departure from customized software solutions that require long design and development periods, as well as hefty capital investments.

Today’s automated platforms must keep pace with the evolving capabilities of commerce. With the end-user in mind, all-in-one solutions are built to respond to ongoing expansion. As new sales channels emerge, these software providers generate new and updated connections that allow businesses to use their data integration software without any interruptions.

To discover how Alluvia’s plug-and-play platform can solve your data integration challenges and save your business time and money, contact us today to schedule a demo.