Your ecommerce platform is the lifeblood of your business. It’s where sales happen, customers interact with your brand, and data flows seamlessly. But what happens when you need to switch your ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) system? The decision to switch ERPs isn’t just about upgrading technology; it’s about ensuring that your business remains competitive, scalable, and efficient. While this change can offer significant growth potential, it can also have significant pitfalls if managed incorrectly.

Potential Growth Areas of Switching ERPs

Switching to a new ERP system can unlock several growth opportunities for your ecommerce website:

Scaling Your Business

As your business grows, your old ERP may struggle to keep up. A new, more advanced ERP can support additional markets, larger product catalogs, and complex business processes. This scalability ensures that your ERP can handle growth without sacrificing performance or customer experience.

Catching Up with Current Technology

Technology evolves rapidly, and an outdated ERP system can hold your business back. Modern ERPs come with advanced features such as AI-driven analytics, real-time data processing, and seamless integrations with other business tools. These capabilities can help you stay ahead of the competition by enabling faster decision-making and more agile responses to market changes.

Customizable Integrations for a Tailored Experience 

Every ecommerce business is unique, and an out of the box ERP solution might not meet your specific needs. Those needs lead to a necessity to innovate. New ERP systems offer customizable integrations that allow you to tailor the software to your business processes. This flexibility can lead to innovation, enabling you to provide a more personalized customer experience.

Achieve Faster and Smarter Profit 

Every business needs to optimize their profits. An optimized ERP system can streamline your order process for your full omnichannel, reduce costs, and increase efficiency. By automating manual tasks, improving inventory management, and providing real-time insights, a new ERP can help you achieve faster and smarter profits.

Potential Pitfalls for your eCommerce Business

Despite the potential for growth, switching ERPs is not without its challenges. Some pitfalls that could prove fatal if not fully understood. Overcoming these hurdles are crucial to mitigating risks and ensuring a smooth transition.

Integration Disruptions

One of the biggest risks of switching ERPs is the disruption of ecommerce integration. Your website likely relies heavily on the ERP for key ecommerce functions like real-time inventory updates, order processing, and customer data synchronization. If the integration between your ecommerce platform and the new ERP is not handled properly, it could result in broken order workflows, inaccurate stock levels displayed online, and delays in fulfillment. These disruptions can significantly impact customer experience, leading to lost sales and diminished brand trust.

Data Migration Risks 

Migrating data from your old ERP to the new one is a complex process that comes with significant risks. Data integrity must be maintained during the transfer, and any discrepancies could lead to issues such as lost orders or having to create new logins/setups for customers to use the ecommerce website. Ensuring pricing, images, product descriptions, and customer information flows correctly from the new ERP to the website  is critical to avoiding these problems.

Security

Data security is paramount during an ERP switch. The process involves transferring sensitive business data, including financial records, customer information, and proprietary business processes. Any breach or loss of data could result in exposing your customer's sensitive information or taking your website offline.

Website Downtime

ERP transitions can sometimes lead to website downtime or service interruptions, as the website is pulling pricing and inventory levels from the ERP. Even short periods of downtime can have significant impacts on sales and customer trust, making it essential to plan for and minimize this risk.

Supply Chain Disruption

An ERP system often plays a central role in managing the supply chain. Switching systems can disrupt this process–leading to delays, stockouts, or overstock situations. Careful planning and close monitoring are required to ensure that the supply chain continues to operate smoothly during the transition.

How Switching ERPs Can Affect Your eCommerce Website

The effects of switching ERPs extend beyond back-end operations; they can significantly impact your ecommerce website’s performance and user experience.

Order Processing and Customer Experience 

Order processing is one of the most critical functions affected by an ERP switch. Any delays or errors in this process can lead to dissatisfied customers and lost sales. Identifying potential order delays and implementing strategies to mitigate them is crucial to maintaining business continuity.

The ERP system is integral to processing orders and managing customer interactions on your website. If the new system is not properly configured, it can lead to slower order processing times, errors with inventory availability, and issues with customer communication. These problems can negatively affect the overall customer experience and lead to a loss of business.

Impact on User Experience

Switching ERPs can bring about changes in website functionality and performance. However, these changes don’t have to be negative. With the right planning, the new ERP can actually enhance the user experience by providing faster load times, more accurate product information, full access to past invoices, and better overall site performance. Incorporating UI/UX design improvements during the ERP switch can turn potential disruptions into opportunities for enhancement.

New Integration for Synching Your Items and Inventory Levels

A new ERP system often comes with improved capabilities for managing inventory and syncing product data across platforms. This can lead to more accurate inventory levels on your website, reducing the risk of overselling or stockouts. Additionally, better integration with fulfillment systems can lead to faster shipping times and improved customer satisfaction.

Strategies for a Smooth Transition

Successfully switching ERPs requires careful planning and execution. Here are some strategies to help ensure a smooth transition:

Thorough Planning and Testing

A successful ERP switch starts with thorough planning. This includes mapping out all necessary steps, identifying potential risks, and setting a realistic timeline. Before going live with the new system, conduct extensive testing to ensure that all integrations, data flows, and functionalities are working correctly.

Data Integrity and Migration 

Ensuring the integrity of your data during migration is essential. This involves carefully mapping out the data migration process, cleaning up old data, and validating the accuracy of the transferred data. Gathering all data sources in advance and ensuring that they are properly integrated into the new ERP can prevent issues such as double entries or lost orders.

User Training and Support

The success of an ERP switch depends not only on the technology but also on the people using it. Providing comprehensive training to employees on how to use the new system is crucial. Additionally, offering customer support during the transition can help address any issues that arise and ensure a smooth customer experience.

How Fusionary Can Help

At Fusionary, we are the experts in providing you with a tailored ecommerce experience that overcomes the potential pitfalls of an ERP transition. We keep your business up and running so can you worry less and do more.

User Experience Focus

We specialize in building websites tailored to different user experiences. By focusing on each of your customer’s unique needs, we can improve their overall experience on your site. This focus on user experience ensures that your ecommerce platform remains customer-centric, even during an ERP transition.

Fusionary’s Composable Commerce Approach

Our composable commerce approach simplifies the ERP transition process. By utilizing best in class software components, we create flexible, scalable websites that can easily integrate with your new ERP system. This approach not only minimizes disruptions and presents new solutions and flexibility. Our goal is a zero interruption transition and have your website feed into two systems for a short time. We can help you use your existing ERP system on a Thursday and a brand new one on a Friday. 

Custom Development and Integration Solutions

Fusionary’s ability to create bespoke solutions ensures that your website will seamlessly integrate with the new ERP system. We work closely with your team to understand your specific needs and develop custom solutions that fit your business model. Our partnerships with leading ERP providers allow us to deliver solutions that are both innovative and reliable.

Continuous Improvement

With the Fusionary experience, our commitment to continuous improvement goes beyond typical website maintenance. When we build your ecommerce website, we use technology that doesn’t require constant patching or upgrades. This allows you to repurpose the budget normally spent on maintenance towards adding new content, products, promotions, or even a blog. Paying for maintenance is outdated, and we believe those resources should be focused on enhancing the user experience and driving business growth, not on fixing technical issues. 

We are always looking to optimize your site and enhance the user experience. 

Hypercare

We never launch your new ERP-integrated website and leave you to fend for yourself. Our approach during your first two weeks after launch is what we call Hypercare. During Hypercare, we prioritize every concern, ensuring that your business runs smoothly and without disruptions.

Some changes can be minor like noticing through A\B testing that users are populating a form on the bottom of the page quite a bit so maybe we move it up. Another example could be that you see a change in a particular product being sold more or less and want to modify the search algorithm so customers can find that product even more.

Wrapping up

The process of switching ERPs and making sure your website is unaffected is a significant undertaking, but it doesn’t have to be overwhelming. At Fusionary, we are dedicated to providing data-driven, efficient, and predictive solutions that ensure your ERP and eCommece transition is successful. With a 96% on-time delivery rate, you can trust us to handle the complexities of your ERP switch and keep your ecommerce website running smoothly.

Contact us today for a consultation to discuss your specific needs and learn how Fusionary can help you achieve a seamless and successful ERP transition. Your business deserves the best in class ecommerce platform. Let’s help you get there, today.