The Motivation Behind Pakk: Part 2
We think e-commerce is fundamentally different now.
In the age of 5G, mobile devices, apps and hyperconnectivity, customers expect more from online stores than a simple catalogue with buy buttons. The best stores are highly interactive windows into core business processes. How many of this product is in stock? When will it be delivered? If it’s out of stock, can I get a notification when it comes back into stock? Have I already bought this product? When? What help can you offer me on this product? Has someone else already asked the same question about this product?
A webstore can only begin to answer these types of questions if it’s an integral part of the whole business, not a bolt-on. Going back to the original list of options (see Part 1), it should now then be obvious that choosing a way to launch a nice looking store is only the beginning of any e-commerce journey — the real voyage is what comes next: integration hell.
Just for fun, pick any option from the list in Part 1 and type it into a search engine, appending the words ‘integration problems’, and spend 10 minutes browsing the forums and blog articles that come up. It’s an enlightening excercise.
What to integrate with?
That, of course, depends on your business needs. Again, the potential list is gigantic, but here’s a quick roundup:
- Simple accounting software (Xero, Quickbooks Online, Sage Online)
- More complex accounting sofware (Sage 50, Sage 200, Zoho Accounts)
- A monolithic open-source ERP (Odoo, ERPNext)
- A monolithic SaaS ERP (Netsuite, SAP, Hosted)
- Inventory management software (Trade Gecko, Unleashed, Zoho Inventory)
- Operations management / channel selling software (Brightpearl)
It’s easy to relegate this decision to an afterthought, but this is where the ‘fun’ really starts. What if you need accounting and inventory? Do you integrate your store into an accounting package and an inventory package, or perhaps the inventory package integrates to the accounting package and you only have to integrate to the accounting package, or vice versa. Head spinning yet? OK, what about integrating to a full ERP? Can you afford thousands a month for the ERP, and hundreds to maintain the integration? Will it be a one-way integration, two-way integration, point-to-point integration or middlware-based integration? When a customer calls to ammend an order, will you do it on the e-commerce platform software, on the inventory manager software or on the accounting software?
This is the state of e-commerce software right now and it’s why we’re building Pakk in the way we are.
