THE BEST INTEGRATIONS FOR YOUR ECOMMERCE SITE

Integrations help you manage your store the way you want.

For your eCommerce site, you’ll probably have integrations for a multitude of reasons. From those designed for order and content management, delivery systems, warehouse management, and payment processes to email automation and communications, search and monitoring, and perhaps even personalization tools. No doubt, you’ve spent plenty of time and energy sourcing the right ones for your business and making them work on your existing site.

But do you think about migrating or even upgrading your site, say from an increasingly outdated Magento 1 to the newer, slicker Magento 2, and shudder away from the idea of moving all your integrations? That’s understandable. After all, they took time to get them right in the first place. But it could be that it’s holding you back from a more powerful site, and better customer service.

After all, Magento 2 has been designed to integrate with almost anything.

WHY MAGENTO 2 IS BETTER FOR INTEGRATIONS:

Magento is open-source and fuelled by a community of more than 150,000 talented developers. For that reason it means it’s completely scalable and flexible, enabling you to develop a site that’s customized to your exact needs. In short, it’s been developed to help you get on top of all your options: to integrate the things you want to – easily.

Think about the ways you can improve your customer experience. Can they create wishlists? Do they have the option for advanced search, or to filter by category? Is there room for product comparison or layered navigation? If not, you might want to consider it – and then discover the possible integrations you can utilize.

Magento positions itself as one of the best site hosts for integrations. For eCommerce, it integrates with the big players, such as PayPal, eBay, Amazon, Google Shopping, TrustPilot, and MailChimp. But Magento 2 takes you further and offers you a more powerful platform. It’s packed with possible integrations for SEO, catalog management, and marketing tools.

The benefit of Magento 2 is that it has a modular code base, making it easier to customize, with a faster time-to-market. So, if you want to make changes to your store, and improve its functionality, it’s much faster and more efficient on Magento 2 – giving you greater freedom to try things out with it costing the earth.

In short, it opens up endless possibilities, so you can take your existing integrations with you – or use a Magento 2 upgrade as an opportunity to discover and test new and better integrations.

Here are just a few integrations we think are worth including in your eCommerce site to improve performance, support growth, and generally help you build an awesome site.

MAGENTO 2 FOR SALESFORCE

This is a powerful CRM tool that allows you to keep your interactions with customers all the same place. Its primary focus is on marketing automations and analytics. So, if you’re building or growing a customer-centric store, then Salesforce could be your secret weapon. It’s designed to give you the full picture of your customer. You’ll be able to view activity history, carry out internal discussions and keep an eye on customer communications. Track customer purchases and easily see where every lead is in the funnel. Plus, it connects to social media, making it pretty useful if you run regular social campaigns. That’s not to mention the extensive reporting and forecasting abilities Salesforce has.

It may be that you’ve toyed with the idea of Salesforce, but haven’t been able to integrate with Magento 1. Magento 2 makes it easier to integrate Salesforce using an API.

MAGENTO 2 FOR INSTAGRAM AND FACEBOOK

Magento 2 integrations include Instagram Shop and Facebook Messenger. Extending your store beyond the realms of passive post sharing can have a huge impact on store growth, reach and conversions. We live in an omnichannel world, and if you can offer your customers the ability to browse and shop on Instagram, as well as through your store, you not only open up a door to a wider audience but enable that audience to take action and purchase fast.

Facebook Messenger is much more than it used to be and is increasingly being integrated for business. Why? It’s an easy and familiar tool you can utilize for personalized customer care. Some stores use this instead of ChatBots.

MAGENTO 2 FOR HUBSPOT

If you haven’t used HubSpot, we highly recommend you get familiar with this friendly tool. This integration is one of the most powerful out there for giving you easy, fast and accurate insights. It can help you get to know your customers, track their behavior, keep an eye on products and orders, and send emails in response to an action. For example, HubSpot will help you send an encouraging email to someone who has just abandoned their cart. It can initiate communication between you and a potential, or converted, customer without you having to lift a finger – and give you all the background details on what’s working and what’s not. HubSpot works pretty hard for your site in terms of overall synchronicity, campaign management (you can run a campaign entirely through HubSpot to track its effectiveness and insights), product management, and user journeys.

Integrate this from your Magento 2 admin panel. So, it’s easy to both manage your store and have easy access to in-depth product details.

MAGENTO 2 FOR SUBSCRIPTIONS AND RECURRING PAYMENTS

Subscriptions have increased dramatically in recent years. In fact, the subscription market for eCommerce has grown by more than 100% in just the last five years. Subscriptions for customers are often a lifestyle choice, and for stores make sound financial sense, offering a steady income stream and allowing you to build on customer service and experience. Magento 2 has a new Subscriptions and Recurring Payments integration that allows you to streamline your subscription revenue. It enables you to choose different subscription plans for different products, manage your customer profiles and accounts, engage in trial plans and allow customers access to a ‘My Account’ panel from which they have the opportunity to suspend, cancel or renew subscriptions.

With Stripe payments and PayPal, this is an integration to make introducing (or updating) subscriptions easy for both you and your customers.

MAGENTO 2 FOR IMPROVED PAYPAL

Not only does a Magento upgrade to Version 2 allow you to deliver a better PayPal integration, it can also open up the opportunity to take your payments process to the next level. PayPal Payments Pro (or PayPal Websites Payments Pro as it’s called if you’re located outside the US) is a new and improved way of creating a customized and personalized payment journey for your customers. It’s improved payment services with the capacity to give your customers a cohesive and comprehensive experience, for example, it has the ability to add product images to order summaries.

Not only that, but Payments Pro automatically enables PayPal Express Checkout – that’s right you can have both at the same time – so your payment service is accessible to more than 110 million PayPal users who want to make rapid purchases. 

It can be daunting to consider a Magento upgrade (especially if your site is performing well) but the ROI will soon outweigh the initial resource it takes to make the move. It’s an investment in your future.