E-Commerce and Salesforce – Match made in heaven ?

E-Commerce and Salesforce – Match made in heaven ?

E-commerce is a key component of business success for both B2B and B2C sales. For e-commerce to provide the features of modern online shopping, businesses need to set up a platform which can be integrated across technology. Such platforms seamlessly weave together the e-commerce, CRM, production and financial systems. The idea is to move from separate systems that are bolted together, to fully integrated systems with bi-directional communication and data that is synchronized immediately.

Salesforce’s success is mainly due to the ease with which it provides seamless integration with other business critical applications and in this case, the integration options it provides for all the leading E-Commerce websites.

Let’s see a case study below to better understand the value addition the integration provides.

The Appstore Integration Project – A Case Study:

At our clients place, ‘Appstore’ is a B2C website where customers can make online purchases of the financial softwares available online. The ‘Appstore’ is developed over the open source e-commerce application Magento. As part of the recent integration project this ‘Appstore’ portal is integrated with Salesforce together with the Salesforce is integrated with PeopleSoft CRM all using SOAP based integration.

Business Challenge:

Before Integration these applications exists as silos without an integration in between, which required huge manual updates from system to system to track the purchases made in “Magento” to the opportunities created in “Salesforce” and any support cases created in “PeopleSoft CRM”. The objective of this project was to integrate the three systems so data flows seamlessly between them both ways.

Types of Integration available:

• SOAP based Integration
• Rest based Integration
• Prebuilt connectors.

On The build Vs Buy analysis the cost required to build this integration and the impact on the existing business process made the business users to go ahead with developing integration between the systems using either SOAP or REST rather going for a prebuilt connector. We have chosen the SOAP based integration to integrate the ‘Appstore’ and Salesforce as well as Salesforce and PeopleSoft CRM.

Functional Flow (Sample Use Case):

User -> ‘Makes Purchase in Appstore’ -> Opportunity Created in Salesforce -> Case Created in COMPASS
(COMPASS is the PeopleSoft CRM)

Technical Architecture:

Conclusion:

This case study provides a good foundation for thinking along the lines of integrating the E-Commerce with Salesforce thus capable of managing deals more efficiently along with integrating with other enterprise applications.