Blue Link customer, ECS Coffee has certainly come a long way since their humble beginnings as a small company with part-time operations out of a garage in North Burlington, Ontario. They have grown quickly since launching in 1997, from having just one employee and one truck to now having over 30 employees, and operating a growing omnichannel business. As an omnichannel operation ECS has a B2B distribution channel, two B2C retail locations, an in-house service and repair center, and, if that wasn't enough, they have also successfully expanded into the eCommerce retail sphere and have integrated with marketplaces such as Amazon!
The below testimonial video featuring ECS Coffee's Owner and President, Neil Madden shows how the business was able to expand into these markets and streamline their omnichannel operations by implementing Blue Link ERP software. If you're thinking about expanding to new markets, this testimonial is a great example of how integrated technology such as ERP software allows businesses to manage multiple sales channels while maintaining information in a single database.
Why integrate Blue Link with your eCommerce retail site?
Blue Link ERP is an all-in-one solution that takes care of all your eCommerce/omnichannel needs. The robust functionality found in Blue Link goes beyond sophisticated accounting and inventory management. The ability to fully integrate with existing B2C and B2B eCommerce webstores whether it's Magento, Shopify, Shoptrol or any other major hosting site, and marketplace such as Amazon and eBay, allows businesses to grow rapidly and efficiently.
Benefits of integrating your front-end eCommerce and marketplace websites with back-end ERP software includes:
- Bi-directional, up-to-the-minute live updates between Blue Link’s ERP software and your webstores including inventory, orders, shipments and payments.
- As orders come in from your online store inventory levels are tracked and updated automatically and any changes made in an inventory management system will be automatically reflected online. This will prevent you from “selling” products that you cannot deliver.
- Easily share information between both your back-end distribution inventory system and front-end eCommerce sites such as order details, credit card information, ship-to and bill-to addresses and contact information and product details (pricing, descriptions, quantities etc.).
- Automatic notifications to customers – an integrated system can automatically notify customers when orders have been shipped and allow them to track the delivery of products.
- Reduced errors - this type of integration is meant to automate your processes and reduce the need for manual work such as keying in customer information and product information multiple times.
- Simplified price changes to inventory such as quantity or promotional discounts.
- Increased order volume and decreased costs as customers can purchase more products, more often without the need for additional staff to deal with maintaining accurate inventory data and processing transactions.
- Secure, online credit card transactions.
- Integration with shipping tools allows you to shop for the best rate and determine the cheapest shipping method/carrier on each order.
Extensive Reporting
Blue Link also provides robust reporting functionality to enable real-time visibility into the status of accounts, orders, inventory and sales, sales-by-date, sales-by-customer/product, inventory slow-moving items, profit-by-customer/product, income statements etc., for all channels. Users are able to pull information from different areas of the software to customize virtually any report employees, customers or management may want.
Blue Link reporting services include:
- Completely customizable report creation for all your sales channels including eCommerce data
- Ability to leverage data already entered into Blue Link in order to generate a report, render it a PDF, create an email, put your message in the email and send it to all appropriate stakeholders – this is done automatically
- Automatically send a message/report to customers through your email
- Live link Blue Link data to Excel to easily create reports and pivot tables with the ability to automatically refresh data every time the report is accessed
To learn more about what eCommerce and ERP integration can do for your omnichannel business, contact us today! And, be sure to check out ECS Coffee's new Coffee and Water Services program at www.ecscoffeeservice.com.
