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Managing Sales Tax Nexus in QuickBooks Online

March 6, 2023 | accounting, automation, nexus, QuickBooks Online, sales tax, shopify integration, tips | No Comments

weintegrate-nexus-blog

Whether you are a first time eCommerce entrepreneur or a successful veteran of the online world, there is no doubt that you have heard about sales tax nexus, an important yet sometimes confusing concern of operating a successfully online store.  By definition, sales tax nexus defines the level of connection between a seller and a taxing jurisdiction, which will ultimately require a seller to register with a particular jurisdiction, collect, and submit taxes.  The two triggers of nexus compliance are 1) having a physical presence within a jurisdiction, referred to as a Physical Nexus; and 2) reaching certain sales related milestones within a jurisdiction, which is known as Economic Nexus.  The following article explains the difference between the two types of nexus, and how you can manage both of these properly in QuickBooks Online. 

Our disclaimer – the contents contained within this article are meant to be a guideline only.  You should consult your tax accounting professional before incorporating anything outlined below.

Physical Nexus

Simply put, for each location that you operate your business from, such as a corporate office, sales office, or warehouse, you may be obligated to collect and report tax for sales that ship to customers in these state(s).  Because you have an actual physical presence, your sales tax obligations will likely be regardless of how much (or how little) you sell.  QuickBooks Online will automatically manage the corresponding sales tax for your business, as long as you set up your addresses in QuickBooks Online properly.  

If You Ship from a Different Physical Location than Your Office:

1. The Company address field in QuickBooks Online should be set to the location you ship from (e.g. your warehouse).  Note that QBO typically defaults this address to your primary office, so you may need to adjust this if your fulfillment center is in a different location.

2. The Customer-facing address field should be set to reflect your company’s billing address, which may be your corporate office.

Note that QuickBooks Online has a limitation as to the number of addresses it can manage.  In particular, if you ship from more than one physical location, you may run into issues managing Physical Nexus in QBO, and you should work with your accountant as to the best means of addressing this.

If You Ship From Your Office Location or You Don’t Ship at All:

For those of you that don’t ship physical products, or you ship exclusively from the same address as your office, you can leave the Company address field set to the value that QuickBooks Online defaulted to.

Click here to learn more about how to set up QuickBooks Online to manage Physical Nexus.

Economic Nexus

When you sell your products and services to customers in states where you do not have a physical presence, you may find that you do not have any sales tax obligations – at least initially.  However, be mindful that as your sales increase in a particular state, you may exceed a sales related threshold that establishes an Economic Nexus, requiring you to submit sales tax to the state after all.

It’s important to know that each state operates based on their own set of rules, which yes, can be as overwhelming as it sounds.  For example, California’s Economic Nexus threshold is currently $500,000 in sales, while Arizona is only $150,000. Alaska on the other hand has a $100,000 sales threshold or 200 retail sales transactions (whichever comes first).  Fortunately, QuickBooks Online does a decent job of managing Economic Nexus thresholds, inclusive of providing visibility as to how close you are toward reaching thresholds in each jurisdiction that you are selling to.

For additional information on running Economic Nexus reports in QuickBooks Online, Click here.

Managing Tax Obligations

Keeping track of sales tax, collecting the correct amounts, and managing both physical and economic tax requirements across multiple states can be challenging without the proper systems in place.  QuickBooks Online eases this process, particularly when used in conjunction with WeIntegrate’s automated bookkeeping app that synchronizes data from Shopify instantly into QuickBooks Online.  Having the most current data loaded into QBO on a timely basis helps ensure that you have an accurate account of your nexus compliance obligations.

For a more in-depth review of sales tax nexus, check out QuickBooks’ Blog titled Understanding nexus and what it means for your business.

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By We Integrate, LLC

How to Integrate Shopify with QuickBooks Online using weintegrate

February 27, 2022 | accounting, automation, E-commerce, efficiency, integration, operations, QuickBooks Online, shopify integration, startup, tips | No Comments

Shopify Integration with QBO Setup

It’s an exciting moment when you launch your Shopify store!  It’s even more exciting when your first sales come rolling in!  It doesn’t take long before you realize the need to have control over key back-office functions such as managing fulfillments, sales, inventory and cash flow. 

As a Shopify merchant, it is never too early to establish efficiencies for growing your e-commerce business.  As an example, automating synchronization between Shopify and QuickBooks Online can be setup for less than 50% of the cost it would take to have your accountant create manual entries in QuickBooks Online.  This becomes working capital that you can invest into your e-commerce top-line growth, including your marketing funnel and eliminating cart friction.

Advantages of automated bookkeeping between Shopify and QuickBooks Online include:

  1. Redirecting your valuable time toward growing sales instead of entering manual data
  2. Lowering costs and errors associated with entering Shopify sales in QuickBooks Online
  3. Increased accuracy of fulfillments, inventory and customer satisfaction
  4. Improved decision making based on up-to-date key data such as sales, profits and cash

(click here to read Integrating Shopify with QuickBooks Online – Why is it So Essential?)

Establishing Shopify integration with QuickBooks Online via weintegrate gives you the additional advantage of instant, unattended automation.  Sales integrate with QuickBooks Online as soon as they are placed on Shopify (you don’t have to wait 3 to 5 days). Having access to the most up-to-date key performance data, empowers you to make accurate and intelligent business decisions, faster than your competitors.

How to Setup Shopify Integration with QuickBooks Online:

Another essential difference of weintegrate, is how easy it is to set up and start integrating.  Upon logging into your weintegrate account, the app directs you to a simple setup wizard that guides you through a series of questions and settings.  No accountant needed. It’s as simple as this…

  • Click Step 1: Specify and connect your Shopify store
  • Click Step 2: Add your QuickBooks Online Company
  • Click Step 3: Sales Settings such as whether to use the Shopify order number or QBO transaction number and shipping service levels
  • Click Step 4: Refund Defaults such as what bank account to use
  • Click Step 5: Customer matching where you set whether to track customer details or just load all Shopify sales into a single bulk customer in QBO
  • Click Step 6: Item matching where you specify whether to track inventory or load all Shopify sales into a single bulk item in QBO

It’s that simple!  The entire process can take as little as 10 to 15 minutes.  Once completed, all of your Shopify sales, refunds and fulfillment updates start automatically, instantly and unattendedly integrate with QuickBooks Online. No buttons to push.

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By We Integrate, LLC

Integrating Shopify with QuickBooks Online – Why is it So Essential?

September 24, 2021 | accounting, automation, E-commerce, efficiency, how to, integration, operations, QuickBooks Online, shopify integration, tips, tips and tricks | No Comments

We get it.  We’ve been there.  Starting a new business can be as daunting as it is exciting.  If you’re a typical entrepreneur, cash flow is at the top of your worry pyramid.  In fact, it goes without saying that when you run out of cash, you run out of business.  As a means of preserving cash, you may do what many of us do, and trade your valuable time (“soft cost”) for the costs of actually investing into tools and much needed technology (“hard cost”). After all, entrepreneurs are experts in multi-tasking and working 29 hour days. If it means saving cash we can flawlessly execute on whatever needs to get done, right?

As an example, many Shopify entrepreneurs are found caught sacrificing their time when it comes to getting e-commerce sales entered into their QuickBooks Online company.  Instead of establishing integration between these 2 key business systems, the viewpoint is typically that their business is either too small or there are just not enough sales to justify automation.  However, when you consider that you could integrate Shopify with QuickBooks Online for as little as $19 a month, the manual route could in fact prove to be the far more costly option, in more ways than one.

The remainder of this article outlines 5 key pitfalls to pay attention to when your Shopify store is not integrated with QuickBooks Online.  If you’re experiencing any of these issues, you may want to consider establishing automated integration sooner than later.

1. Time Spent on Manual Entry is Time Not Spent on Growth

When your systems are not integrated, someone, someway, somehow, has to retype your Shopify sales into QuickBooks Online.  This is a tedious, recurring task that can be as time consuming as it is a distraction from focusing on more important things, such as improving your e-commerce store’s conversions and sales.  If you are thinking that you will just have someone manually enter sales into QuickBooks Online, think about the actual cost (hard or soft) of this decision, and how that compares to just $19 a month for a fully automated solution.  

Regardless of who manually enters your sales into QuickBooks Online, statistics show that mistakes are inevitable.  Errors caused by manual data entry include transpositions and omissions, which can be costly, particularly when such errors go unnoticed for a period of time. In fact, research firm Gartner reports the average cost of poor data quality on businesses is between $9.7 million and $14.2 million.

One of the biggest concerns you might face when entering sales manually is the potential for mistakes in tax filings, and missing important tax filing deadlines. Automating the flow of accurate and timely information about sales helps to reduce tax risks and the potential for compliance penalties.

The bottom line here is that regardless of what stage your Shopify venture is, manual entry becomes a costly distraction. Having to clean up data entry mistakes, address tax filing issues, and unnecessarily draining working capital will likely slow your business’ growth.

2. Disappointing Customers with Out of Stock Items

Nothing will let the air out of your e-commerce balloon faster than having to call back customers and break the bad news that you cannot ship the item(s) they fell in love with because said items are actually out of stock.

How does this happen you ask?  Simple.  It’s another side effect of not integrating Shopify with QuickBooks Online.  When your e-commerce sales are not integrated with your backend system, there is a time lag that causes your systems to be out of sync until such time as the sales are manually entered into QuickBooks Online.  If you are already integrated but your sales are only synchronizing with QuickBooks Online once per hour or once per day, you still run the risk of overselling inventory, as integration needs to occur as instant as possible.  This problem is even more exasperated when you have multiple stores connected to a single inventory source (e.g. omni-channel).  The easiest way to think about this problem is the wider the gap between the time of a sale and the time it takes for inventory data to update, multiplied by the velocity of sales, the bigger the risk of overselling becomes.

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3. Orders Ship to Customers Late or Incorrect

Once those customer orders start rolling in, you have to move promptly to deliver on time.  Customers expect (and I mean expect) top shelf service.  Any delay or mistake that flips the last mile fulfillment process sideways, can drive your customers right into the hands of your competitors.  Two of the most common logistical problems that can occur are a) shipping late to customers, and b) shipping the wrong items.

A decent integration tool with operational oversight can empower you with the basics of ensuring your shipments go out on time, inclusive of being able to establish internal Service Levels (SLAs) that bring your attention to any risks of late shipments.  Real-time integration between Shopify and QuickBooks Online brings additional value to your business process by sending your orders through the fulfillment cycle as rapidly as possible, empowering you to fulfill customer orders accurately and quickly, and strengthening your store’s brand in a competitive marketplace when you consistently deliver what customers expect, as they expect it.

4. Lack of Visibility to Your Key Business Metrics

In a marketplace where competition is fierce, having accurate data at your finger tips is essential for making intelligent, timely business decisions.  When using both Shopify and QuickBooks Online, the best way of gaining visibility into these key sales and financial metrics is by leveraging the most real-time integration possible.  Synchronization with QuickBooks Online that is delayed even by just an hour, can lead to gaps that cause incorrect analysis, and impacts your ability to make proper decisions for your business.

You and your accountant must have an accurate view of sales, inventory, cashflow and other key performance indicators that bring clarity to the most efficient and intelligent investments into your Shopify store’s success.  Efficiently managing working capital and inventory replenishment can only occur when your finger is instantly and always on the pulse of your business’ heartbeat.

5. Loss of Your Competitive Edge

Think about it this way.  If you drive a Toyota Corolla, would you think you can win a race against a Ferrari (with all due respect to the Toyota)?  It’s virtually impossible to keep up with your competitors when you’re not leveraging an automated integration solution for your e-commerce store, particularly when they are.  Your competitors will have the advantage, and a stronger handle on managing cost effective inventory that increases their profits, ensuring that items are in stock and delivered to customers on time, and maintaining a high degree of customer satisfaction.  It will be very difficult to outflank them, and they will win the race each and every time.

Conclusion

It’s exciting to have an opportunity to start and grow a Shopify store!  As you maintain good stewardship of your working capital, make sure to avoid these critical issues that can impede your plans for growth and success.  Whether you’re just getting started, or you’re well on your way, automating integration between Shopify and QuickBooks Online can prove to be one of the best investments you make. For a relatively low operating cost, it will free up your resources (including your time), help you gain competitive advantage and drive your business to success.

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By We Integrate, LLC

Drive the Winning Road to E-Commerce Success

April 19, 2021 | automation, cart abandonment, conversions, E-commerce, efficiency, fulfillment, integration, inventory, operations, tips | No Comments

winning-ecommerce-success

Whether you’re a brick and mortar retail veteran, or an aspiring entrepreneur looking to make your mark, it’s hard to ignore e-commerce as a sales channel for capitalizing on new market opportunities.  According to a Statista study, “revenue from e-commerce in the United States amounted to 431.6 billion U.S dollars in 2020,” and “estimates that by 2025, revenue will increase to 563.4 billion dollars,” representing a 31% growth trajectory. 

Very exciting indeed, but if the world of online selling interests you, how do you get started?  What should you do first?  This article guides you to reviewing 4 of the most important steps in driving to a successful e-commerce business.

1. Choose the Right Product

It all starts with answering the question “what are you going to sell?”  It sounds simple enough, but figuring out what you are going to sell, and whom you are going to sell to, can very well be the hardest part of getting your e-commerce business off the ground.  Entrepreneurs often focus on their passion, and it certainly is important to be excited and believe in what you sell online.  That said, make sure to validate the market for your potential products before investing your time and money, otherwise you might be disappointed in the results.  Common ways of validating include surveys, competitive reviews, and social research.  

You will also want to determine the best means of obtaining, stocking, and fulfilling your products.  What business model will you use?  Will you distribute products from another brand, or manufacture your own?  Will you stock inventory or dropship direct to your customers?  How many options and variants will you offer?  The recommendation on the latter is to keep options minimal as you get started.  This helps keep your costs down and simplifies the decision making process for your customers, which in turn reduces friction en route to a sale.

Additional articles to help guide you into making the correct product decisions for your business include:

12 Trending Products to Sell in 2021(and Ideas for How to Market Them)

Find a Product to Sell: 12 Strategies for Finding Your First Profitable Product

From Dropshipping to DTC, Here are the Most Popular Business Models for Ecommerce

2. Locate Your Customers and Determine How Best to Market to Them

Now that you know what you want to sell and have validated the opportunity, it’s time to think about how you will market your products to your new customers.  It’s often good to start by defining a customer persona which helps you understand who your customers are, including age, sex, occupation, interests, demographics, and why they would buy from you.  Gather meaningful information to define your target audience, and then hone in on where your target audience hangs out, along with how best to reach them.

Once you find them, manage communication with your prospects by first segmenting them into 3 main stages of engagement: Top-of-the-funnel (ToFu), Middle-of-the-funnel (MoFu), and Bottom-of-the-funnel (BoFu).  ToFu is where prospects express interest, however they are not ready to engage you and your product just yet.  MoFu are those prospects that have engaged you, but are not yet ready to purchase.  BoFu is where prospects are ready to take the plunge, and place their first order with you.  Understanding which stage your prospects are in is critical to ensuring that you communicate with them properly and lead them from ToFu through BoFu.

The following resources can help you target your customers and increase revenue:

How to Define Your Target Market

What’s the Right Content for Each Stage of the Marketing Funnel?

4 Ways to Find Your First 50 eCommerce Customers

3. Remove Friction from the Checkout Process

You’ve been successful driving traffic to your e-commerce store, and BoFu prospects are ready to become customers.  With typical shopping cart abandonment rates between 60% and 80%, you will want to now focus your attention on eliminating as much friction as possible, so your hopefully soon-to-be-customers have a clear and easy path to checking out and placing their orders.

To keep fiction minimal, it is recommend you focus on:

Increasing site speed – statistics show that pages that take longer than 3 seconds will likely lead to abandonment.   Learn more about improving your e-commerce site performance and speed.

Optimize your store for mobile – With 31% of e-commerce sales occurring via mobile devices, ensure your store is optimized accordingly.  3 out of 4 online shoppers indicate they start their online purchase via a mobile device, as it saves time.

Make product selection easy – ensure products are well organized and easy to find.  Offering too many options may cause confusion and make the buying decision more complicated, ultimately leading to abandonment.

Offer payment options that align with customer preference – consumers have clear preferences on payment methods.  Limiting how customers can pay could become an obstacle for converting sales.  

Enable Guest Checkout – allowing guest checkout will lessen friction and lead to more conversions, however you will not have captured key customer information which could limit your post-sales marketing opportunities.  Nonetheless, less friction leads to increasing sales.  Encourage account registration and repeat customer loyalty via incentives, coupons, and exclusive benefits for signing up (e.g. free shipping).

To learn more about reducing checkout friction: 

5 Tips to Reduce Friction on Your E-Commerce Website

4. Automate Your Operations

Now that your e-commerce sales are rolling in, it’s game on!  The final mile of ensuring a positive customer experience is delivering your products to your customers accurately and on-time.  It’s important to put systems in place that automate synchronization between your e-commerce stores and your back office systems in order to track sales, inventory and fulfillments in a near real-time capacity.  For example, if an order is placed on your e-commerce platform (e.g. Shopify) and it’s not entered or synchronized into your back office system (e.g. QuickBooks Online) for an hour (or longer), this could cause your e-commerce inventory to become stale and put you at risk of selling items that are no longer in stock. 

Equally important is leveraging a tool that provides visibility into your fulfillments.  After all the time and investment made into getting your customers to buy, ensuring on-time delivery is essential for all business models, and particularly critical for managing dropship relationships.  All it takes is one negative fulfillment experience to drive your customers away from your store and right into the hands of your competitors.

Now is the perfect time to launch your online store and invest some time into ensuring you position your business for success!  Following the steps outlined in this article and maintaining good business sense, will help you to get across that finish line!

Click Here to learn how weintegrate helps provide fulfillment oversight and automated integration between Shopify and QuickBooks Online.

Learn More how to use weintegrate FREE for 3 Months!

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By We Integrate, LLC

It’s Time to Get Your E-Commerce Operations Ready for the Holidays

October 27, 2020 | automation, E-commerce, fulfillment, holiday, integration, inventory, operations, tips | No Comments

E-commerce sales continue to report year-over-year growth.  As stated in a recent Forbes article, “This will be the year when online shopping explodes.”  The same article references Deloitte’s 2020 holiday e-commerce forecast where “Deloitte predicts e-commerce holiday retail sales to grow between 25% to 35% from November through January, reaching $182 billion to $196 billion in total.

If you’ve already launched your e-commerce store(s), then you’re fortunate to be in the right place at the right time, particularly if your product line caters to holiday gifting categories.  But to achieve e-commerce success takes much more than being in the right moment… This is only the beginning.

So ask yourself…are you ready?  Have you kicked the tires of your e-commerce operations?  What would actually happen if you scored a growth surge this holiday season?  Are you prepared to handle the additional work that comes with additional orders?   Without the proper systems, process, and organization in place, time consuming work often leads to mistakes, out of stocks, late shipments, and ultimately dissatisfied customers.

But not to worry.  Here are a few simple tips that can help you prepare for the upcoming holiday surge, ongoing customer satisfaction, and operational sustainability.

1. Confirm Your E-Commerce Supply Chain Strength

Regardless of whether you are a dropshipper, distributor of finished goods, or manufacturer, you maintain an e-commerce supply chain made up of vendors that impact your ability to deliver quality products to your customers.  Remember that when you have issues with inventory, your customers will care little as to who’s at fault.  As your #1 priority, you will want to confirm your vendors’ ability to meet your holiday targets without fail.  Pick up the phone, share your forecasts with them (consider inflating them by 20%), and ask for capacity guarantees. 

Additionally, it’s the perfect time to set a schedule with your vendors and ask of any known obstacles they see on the horizon or that they may have already encountered.  Get to know your vendors at a personal and friendly level.  You are not the only one vying for their commitments, and sometimes those friendly relationships may help prioritize your business needs. 

And lastly, create a backup plan.  What will you do should your supply chain break?  Hopefully you won’t have any issues, but do you have a plan?  Can your plan include having a backup vendor, or perhaps splitting your current needs across multiple vendors to balance the load?  Do what you can to prevent your business from being held hostage to this key element of success.

2. Automate Your E-Commerce Operations

According to Intuit, “over 80% of product-based SMBs [small and medium sized businesses] that sell through multiple channels still reconcile inventory using pen and paper or spreadsheets.”  This is crazy!  Why haven’t more SMBs made some form of investment into back-office automation?  While it sounds intimidating and expensive, it’s not.  There are affordable options in the market that start as low as $19 per month. A few of the top problems that e-commerce businesses face related to manual data entry, and can be resolved with automated integration include:  

  1. Errors caused by manually entering e-commerce orders into your back-office system
  2. Tedious and Time consuming administrative tasks that impede the ability to focus on more valued and strategic business needs, such as how to reduce cart abandonment
  3. Timeliness of order and inventory updates to back-office and shipping systems, which in turn leads to incorrect stock levels, as well as shipments going to customers later than promised

The following are key business issues you will want to address by implementing an integration solution:

  1. Does the solution offer near real-time sync of orders from your e-commerce platform(s) to your back-office system? This will help ensure that your inventory levels are as current as your sales, keeping you on top of your customer orders as they are placed
  2. Establish an integrated shipping system process that feeds from the same automation and empowers you to get your merchandise out the door in the most timely, efficient, and accurate means possible
  3. Have control over shipping SLAs (service level agreements), and receive notifications of orders that are at risk of falling outside these guidelines, so you can take the appropriate actions to resolve

Click here to learn more about our beta opportunity

3. Organize Your E-Commerce Operations Area 

When it comes to establishing a proper e-commerce operations process, it’s all about efficiency and accuracy.  It’s about having the proper checks and balances in place that eliminate mistakes and minimize the time spent on a particular task (so you can get to the next task, and so on and so on).  

A fairly common issue with SMBs is having a disorganized and cluttered work area, which lends itself to bottlenecks in the process.  It sounds simple enough to avoid, right?  In fact, yes it is.  A few ideas that have been proven to help include:

  1. Organize your inventory bins for efficiency.  It’s common for businesses to organize inventory in such a way that keeps the same or similar products near each other.  What would be a more proper approach, is to understand which of your items sell the most – not in dollar value but in actual physical units.  The products that sell the most (referred to as ‘turns’), represent the products that you will be fulfilling the most.  The ideal means of organizing your inventory bins is to locate those products that turn the most to be closest to your fulfillment zone, and work your way back through your turns rate in descending sequence, locating products that sell the least to be the furthest away from your fulfillment zone.  Click here to learn more about lean warehousing efficiency practices known as 5S.
  2. Squeeze as many little extra actions out of the process as is possible.  Every small little action you perform or step you take adds up into a whole chunk of waste and opportunity for error.  Therefore it is recommended to take a look at your entire operations area and see that you are well prepared to reduce these efforts.  Some examples include: a) label your inventory bins clearly, using large dark font; b) implement a barcode scanning system if possible; c) obtain enough supplies to get you through the holiday season in advance, including printer ink, paper, labels, shipping cartons, packing tape and inserts
  3. Establish zones and maintain clutter free work areas.  Maintaining clean work areas make it easier to get through daily tasks, inclusive of finding objects when you need them.  Establish specific well organized zones that create a linear physical path from start to finish, such as your storage zone to your fulfillment zone to your shipping zone.  Ideally a shipping zone is best located closest to where your carrier and parcel pickups occur, and then work backwards into your work area.

By implementing a proper marketing strategy, you may be well poised to feel a positive bump in revenue this holiday season, however keeping your customers coming back for more, will greatly depend on your ability to satisfy them better than your competitors.  Eliminate waste with integration and operational efficiency, allowing your business to establish a strong foundation for growing beyond the holiday bump up, for years to come.

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By We Integrate, LLC

Increasing E-Commerce Conversions in a Mobile World

February 17, 2019 | conversions, E-commerce, integration, Mobile, tips | No Comments

There is no surprise that mobile commerce, the delivery of electronic commerce capabilities directly into the consumer’s hand via wireless technology, is taking over as the go-to option for consumers to shop.  eMarketer reports that 185.5 million consumers used a mobile device to browse, research and compare products, with 53.7% making a purchase on their mobile device.

If your e-commerce site is not yet mobile-friendly, now is the time to make it so.  Take action now and take advantage of the mobile commerce shift to ensure your site is optimized for mobile well ahead of the 2019 holiday season (which will be upon you before you know it).

Here are 6 tips to help you capitalize on this pandemonium shift in e-commerce…

1. Improve Product Page Performance

The quality of your images will define this first interaction

– Shopify

The saying ‘a picture is worth 1,000 words’ has never been more impactful then when it comes to your e-commerce product pages.  Putting yourself in the eyes of your visitors, it’s the engaging images that first draw the crowd.  According to Shopify “The quality of your images will define this first interaction, the perceived value of your products, and your brand’s image.”

Make sure to use high quality images that are clear and bright, but be sensitive to image density as to not slow down your site’s load times. Incorporate at least 5 good quality images per product, and include various views that demonstrate different angles, perspectives and colors if applicable.  Include at least 1 lifestyle image demonstrating interaction with your product, while building an emotional connection.  Incorporating a short video brings your product to life, and your visitors one step closer to becoming a sale.

Support your product pages with detailed content that empowers the sale.  Ensure a meaningful SEO-friendly product title that makes it easy for shoppers to find your product.  It is recommended that you provide shoppers with all the information necessary for making an informed decision.  This should include price, compare-to-price, a detailed description, a list of important features, competitive advantages, sizes and colors, dimensions and capacity, and brand value.

2. Incorporate a Clear Call-to-Action (CTA)

A Call-to-Action (CTA) is the clear and concise next step you want your visitors to take, which in e-commerce is typically to convert your visitors to a sale.  Successful CTAs stand out in such a way that the next step is obvious.  CTAs should be direct and lead visitors to the conversion with messages such as “Buy Now” and “Add to Cart”.

Incorporate a consistent theme throughout your visitors’ e-commerce journey.  It should become subconscious to the user that every time they see this colored button the next step is to buy, in a Pavlovian sort of way.

If a secondary CTA is beneficial, such as “Add to Wish List”, incorporate a much more subtle thin link that doesn’t compete with the primary CTA.

As a follow up to items added to a cart or wish lists that never convert, incorporate email reminders that invite visitors to finish the sale.  Don’t be shy of using incentives as necessary.

3. Optimize for Mobile Engagement

Mobile friendly pages are essential to providing a positive customer experience. With mobile e-commerce on the rise, if you don’t adapt you will get left in the dust.  Even if purchases happen in store, most users will start by researching products on their mobile device.  Empower visitors to easily conduct research, find related products, make purchases, and even process returns from any mobile device.  Search engines such as Google are now optimizing search with mobile-first indexing.

Confirm page load speeds are tuned for mobile performance.  Slow loading pages will frustrate visitors and drive them to your competitors.  According to section.io, 27.4% of e-commerce visitors will bounce when page load times take 6 seconds or more.  Conduct speed tests with web performance tools such as Google PageSpeed Insights to ensure a successful experience.

4. Increase Consumer Trust with Reviews and Ratings

70% of consumers consult reviews or ratings before making a purchase

– PeopleClaim

One of the best ways of increasing conversions is to build consumer trust via product reviews and ratings.  According to PeopleClaim, 70% of consumers consult reviews or ratings before making a purchase, and 71% agree that consumer reviews make them more comfortable that they are buying the right product.

If you haven’t asked for customer reviews and ratings that you can include on your site, now is a great time to start.  It’s never too soon to start building your consumer credibility.

5. Upsell and Cross-sell Relevant Products

While you have the captive attention of consumers, don’t miss out on the opportunity to cross-sell additional products that may be of interest to them.  Perhaps as consumers read through the details of the current product page, they may determine to take a pass.  Keep visitors engaged with alternate product options utilizing a section tiled “Visitors Who Viewed This Also Viewed” and “Customers Who Bought this Also Bought.”  If visitors have a positive experience with your e-commerce site, then this technique will keep the balls in the air and potentially save the sale.

Cross-selling and Upselling helps to increase conversions and maximize the average value per customer order (known as Average Order Value (AOV)).  According to Forrester Research, upsell and cross-sell strategies are solely responsible for an average of 10-30% of e-commerce business revenues.

6. Eliminate Obstacles at Checkout

According to Forbes, the average online cart abandonment rate is 70%, and 37% of cart abandonments are due to shoppers being asked to create an account.  Customers have come to expect convenience inclusive of a quick checkout process. 

Consider offering a guest checkout option.  Customers happy with your e-commerce experience will return and opt-in to create an account when they’re good and ready.  In pursuit of frictionless checkout and a superior customer experience, include payment options such as PayPal and Venmo.

Enabling an optimized mobile experience is quintessential for your e-commerce success.  Make the necessary investments now while your business may be slower, and lay the ground work leading up to your busiest busy season yet.

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By We Integrate, LLC

5 Benefits of Automated Accounting Integration

October 14, 2018 | accounting, automation, integration, tips | No Comments

As you have likely read, e-commerce sales continue to report explosive growth.  According to a recent Statista study (view report), total e-commerce sales within the United States through Q2 2018 reached $249 billion.  This represents a 17.4% increase over the $212 billion in sales for the same period of 2017, and approximately 10% of total retail sales in the United States.

In pursuit of your piece of the proverbial pie, it is common for a small and growing business to first license a shopping cart, then an accounting system, followed by email marketing, a shipping system, CRM and more.  Establishing all of this disparity and not connecting the dots of data and process has proven to have a negative impact on profits and the ability to scale a small business.  Time will be wasted with duplicate data entry as well as searching for and fixing manually inflicted errors in multiple systems.  You also become prone to incorrect decisions caused by not having access to real-time data analytics housed in one place.

Take your accounting system for example.  Intelligently integrating your e-commerce system with your accounting application provides the following 5 essential benefits…

1. Improved accuracy.  According to a recent study by Royal Mail, 6% of businesses’ annual revenue is being lost through poor data quality.  All it takes is one simple mistake to send your customers to an eagerly awaiting competitor.

With intelligent integration, your orders, payment details, refunds, and more are  loaded with 100% accuracy into your accounting application.  The two systems talk directly to each other without human intervention establishing a degree of accuracy that has a positive impact on your business.

“50% of a worker’s time is wasted finding and correcting errors”

2. Reduction in wasted time.  According to the American Productivity & Quality Center (APQC), the average company spends $24.21 to process a sales order manually.  Further, the Harvard Business Review reports that 50% of a workers time is wasted finding and correcting errors, or attempting to confirm data sources they don’t trust.

The APQC suggests that by incorporating automated integration, the cost of processing a sales order can be reduced to $6.  That’s a savings of $15 per order (multiplied by the number of orders your business processes monthly and annually).

3. Real-time data exchange.  Ensuring accurate available inventory, being able to ship accurately and on time, and obtaining timely sales and e-commerce metrics for important game changing decisions, is a cornerstone of any successful e-commerce business.  Having to wait a day or longer for your systems to be updated can have a severely negative impact on your sustainability.

Properly integrating your e-commerce platform with your accounting system ensures near instant data exchange, understands how to match up your e-commerce customers and items with the appropriate representations in your accounting application, and enables you to manage problems by exception through alerts and notifications.

4. More profitable. As your e-commerce business grows, so do the number of orders you receive.  They go hand in hand.  When your systems are not integrated, the more orders you receive, the more time it takes an employee to manually enter orders into your accounting system.  This translates directly into increased cost of sales, inefficient operations and lower profit margins.

As the business owner entering these orders, you may justify your time spent and call it more of a ‘soft cost’, but make no mistake…it’s a real cost, and one of the most expensive.  It’s ownership opportunity cost.  It’s time you are wasting with data entry when you could be (and should be) focusing on the next innovative strategy for growing your business.

Intelligent automation also means lower accounting fees.  Gone are the days of paying your accounting firm to enter your data manually and fix your mistakes.

5. Win-win for you and your CPA. Imagine how happy your CPA and accounting firm will be when they no longer have to clean up time consuming mistakes you make each month in data entry and attempted journal entries.  While your CPA bill may be less, your accounting firm will be thrilled.  Instead of wasting time cleaning up your mistakes, they are able to bring on more clients with less staff, and increase their own profitability.  They will be so pleased with you, they may even start bringing you donuts again.

Use intelligent integration to improve your operational efficiency, boost your profits, and increase customer satisfaction.  When implemented correctly, It’s a small investment with significant ROI.

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By We Integrate, LLC

Deliver On Time this Holiday Season: 5 Must Use Fulfillment Tips

October 8, 2017 | distribution, holiday, tips | No Comments

You’ve increased your investment into demand generation marketing in anticipation of your best holiday season yet.  As the sales come rolling in, you already know the importance of being able to deliver on everything your customers ordered, or they won’t be your customers for long.  But as a small business operating on QuickBooks and spreadsheets, keeping tabs on your fulfillment process may prove to be more difficult than initially anticipated.

The following 5 tips will help you leverage best practices to help keep customers happy by delivering on time, as expected, and with delightfully positive experiences that lead to 5 star customer reviews.

Tip 1: Know Your Inventory; The Best Form of Customer Service

There is little more frustrating to a customer than finding the perfect gift, placing an order, and then learning after the fact that the product you can’t wait to receive is out of stock.  As fundamental an issue as this may seem, according to the 2017 State of Small Business Report by Wasp Barcode “A surprisingly low 18% of respondents use a sophisticated automated system to manage inventory (only a 2% jump from last year), while 14% of respondents still use manual processes to track inventory, and 21% rely on spreadsheets such as Excel.”  That said, it is essential to know what inventory you have on hand, what inventory is available to sell, and what more you have coming in from your suppliers.  Implementing some means of properly tracking inventory and keeping all sales channels in sync is the best means of eliminating inventory outages and preventing loss of customers.

Tip 2: Deliver on What You Promise

Whether selling through a major retailer or direct to consumer via your own website, it is essential to strive for accuracy of fulfillment rates that are 99% or better.  Accuracy fulfillment rates are generally determined by evaluating such metrics as measuring what was delivered vs. what was ordered, timeliness of delivery vs. promised delivery date, and compliance with required shipping and routing requirements imposed by certain retailers and partners.  To maintain these high but necessary levels will require a meticulous approach to managing logistics, inclusive of empowering employees with systems that maintain real-time accuracy and keep data of disparate applications in sync.  While it may seem daunting at first, maintaining this degree of success will earn consumers’ trust and ensure happy, loyal, repeat customers and high customer lifetime values (CLV).

Tip 3: Build a Scalable Distribution Infrastructure

Working with processes that require hands-on intervention of every order on a daily basis is an impossible feat when thinking in terms of growing your business.  It is vital to implement automated procedures with intelligence that enables a transition to managing operations by exception.  This approach allows all ‘good’ orders to flow seamlessly from your E-Commerce system through to your fulfillment process with little manual intervention, while incorporating pauses for approvals and verification as needed, as well as alerting your team of any exception failures for qualifications such as exceeding credit limit, incorrect pricing, and out of stock items.  Properly implemented automation will increase throughput capacity by an estimated 30 times over a manually controlled process, and provide the fuel and foundation to grow.

Tip 4: Monitor Your Most Critical Fulfillment Statistics

As you would with sales and marketing statistics, pay close attention to the daily performance of your manufacturers, suppliers, and fulfillment partners.  Meticulously manage on time deliveries, accuracy, quality, throughput, and overall supplier performance.  Your partners are an extension of your supply chain and play a key role in keeping your customers happy and coming back for more.  Don’t be shy.  It is critical to address issues with partners as immediate as they occur, and make necessary adjustments on a timely basis.

Tip 5: Be Prepared and Think Ahead

There is little that is more harmful to your business than increasing your sales, and not being prepared to fulfill and ship as expected.  With the holiday season rapidly approaching, it’s not too late to establish the necessary processes and analytics that will make all the difference in the right ways.  While cost and budget should always be a concern, it’s prudent to take time now and think through the “what ifs” of achieving success in sales, and how you plan to meet customer demands.  Be prepared to scale, but also know what your limitations are.

Tip 6: Bonus Tip: Differentiate with Holiday Value-add

Now that you have addressed your fulfillment concerns, it’s time to focus on maximizing your sales potential by differentiating your products during the holiday season.  One simple, cost effective approach that works well is to offer holiday value-adds, such as  including a holiday promotional item, special packaging, or an incentive for a future order.   It doesn’t need to be fancy or costly, but well implemented value-adds will lead to positive feedback and increased repeat ordering.

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By We Integrate, LLC