Several months ago, we quietly rolled out the ability to integrate AIMS 360 with one of the leading ecommerce platforms, Shopify. During the past several months, we have worked with a number of our AIMS users to optimize the integration so that when we were ready to officially announce, the integration would be ready for primetime. We are happy to say that we are ready to roll out the AIMS 360 Shopify Integration to all of our customers. We will continue to add features and work with our users to make sure that the integration supports their ecommerce business.
For those that have been using the Shopify integration, the benefits are clear. You already use AIMS 360 to organize your customer information, process orders and manage inventory from a single source. AIMS 360 automatically captures all the changes to your business processes and organizes your data as a single source of truth. AIMS 360 gives you a complete picture of your inventory and helps eliminate many of order entry and shipping processes that may have been done by hand. The Shopify integration takes our focus on automating processes even further.
The Shopify integration was designed to remove much of the manual work that people might be doing with their ecommerce. Many companies in the fashion industry don’t use an ERP system and are tracking and managing order and shipping data in Excel spreadsheets. For AIMS 360 customers that are using not using the Shopify integration, you would normally export an Excel spreadsheet from AIMS and then enter the orders by hand in Shopify. This is an error-prone, cumbersome and time-consuming process. By taking advantage of our Shopify integration, information that is managed in AIMS can be shared in Shopify, and data entered in Shopify is also stored in AIMS 360.
Consider these scenarios:
Inventory Management
If you are not tracking product inventory in Shopify and simply writing down orders on paper to sort out later in AIMS, you may be taking orders for products that aren’t available. With the Shopify integration, your inventory data in AIMS 360 can be updated effortlessly to Shopify, so customers will not be able to order products that are unavailable or out of stock. In addition, as a result of the integration, rather than doing inventory adjustments by hand once orders are placed in Shopify, the data is automatically updated in AIMS.
Shipping
Without the Shopify integration, shipping can also be a challenge. In some cases, businesses have retail and wholesale businesses, and they may be managing multiple software applications and shipping processes. With an integrated AIMS 360 and Shopify system, once orders have been shipped a tracking number and email confirmation can be quickly sent to Shopify. This allows your customers to see what is happening with their order in real time.
Order Fulfillment
Companies that set up their product styles in Shopify prior to the integration, can map the styles in AIMS. Once orders are placed in Shopify, the data is sent to AIMS where the shipping department would print a pick ticket, pack the order and ship. From AIMS, the shipping department would send a tracking number back into Shopify, marking the order as shipped. Rather than having to use two systems, the shipping department can manage all of the data from AIMS.
Wholesale and Retail Inventory
Companies that have wholesale and retail inventory have the flexibility to use the integrated AIMS 360 and Shopify feature to manage them separately. The last thing that these companies want is for someone to fulfill a retail order with wholesale inventory that was intended for Nordstrom. In this scenario, customers that use the AIMS 360 Shopify integration, can separate their wholesale and retail inventory in AIMS, by simply setting up two completely different warehouses; one for their retail business, and one for their wholesale business.
We built the AIMS 360 Shopify integration to make life easier for our customers that use Shopify to power their online wholesale and retail businesses. AIMS 360 serves as the central location for all the ecommerce data. As new orders are processed in Shopify, the transaction data is updated in AIMS. The appropriate inventory and shipping information can then sent back to Shopify in only a few clicks. Our goal is to provide you an efficient, hassle-free way of managing your ecommerce so that you have more time to build your business, increase your capacity to take more orders and grow sales.
