Zoho Integration

Maximize Business Potential while Keeping Costs Down

Zoho integration to an eCommerce platform allows small to large businesses to personalize the interaction between customers and the core business operations. Zoho offers extensive features, including CRM, financial, and inventory data management. It exposes this data securely while catering to your business model. It can fulfill the needs of your customers, which is critical to compete, grow your business, and increase margins.

Finding the right integration partner is key to a successful project. Make sure that they have previous experience working with Zoho, REST-based APIs, as well as the web API framework. However, they should know not only the technical aspects of these integrations but also the business aspects. It will ensure they are aware of what tends to work best for end-users from a customer experience perspective. Also, the entities your business needs to function initially and what it might need in the future as it grows.

Finding the Right Integration Platform

Another critical aspect of a Zoho integration is finding the right integration platform. It must be secure, scalable, and adaptable so that it can dynamically adjust according to the needs of your business and customers over time. Mostly, it should be able to handle the continually growing demand for more and more transactions.

You should also be able to take off the shelf integration capabilities and extend them. So, there are core integration capabilities between eCommerce platforms and Zoho. You can utilize these entities. However, the real challenge is overriding or extending those core capabilities. So, you can take advantage of these core off the shelf capabilities, but also cater them to your business without excessive overhead.

Moreover, most companies have specific business rules. So, they may require custom entities and fields. The integration platform should incorporate custom fields with data transformations following the business logic. So, each task within those entities will be scheduled according to it. This will ensure that the execution of the integration platform matches the expectations for both the business and end-users.

Adapting the Integrations to Business Logic

Core Integrations

Another essential thing to do is evaluate the off the shelf integrations offered by the platform for your eCommerce platform and Zoho. For example, customers and accounts are a crucial integration. These integrations can either be bi-directional or unidirectional. It depends on what your business needs. Over time, you might go from unidirectional to a bi-directional.

Customers and Accounts

Customers and accounts typically include:

Addresses: both shipping and billing information
Contacts: This can include a hierarchy of contacts that possibly tie back into an eCommerce platform user records
Pricing levels, customer-specific pricing, quantity-specific pricing, price rules
Tax information, like tax exemptions, tax levels
Credit limits or the ability to purchase on account
Past order history data
Invoices and quotes generated within Zoho and then directed into an eCommerce platform. Customers can then pay for them via the front-facing system, after which the transaction and order data will be pushed back into Zoho.

Order Information

It also makes sense to incorporate the overall order information. It typically includes:

Line items
Tax classes of the products within the line items
Shipping and fees
Customs and duties
Any discounts on the items
The shipping level
Payments and transactions
Transaction ID
Split payments or split shipping

All this information can make it easier to manage customer support requests such as replacements or refunds for items or a missing shipment, etc. So, whenever an order is placed, the information needs to be pushed into Zoho. It will make it easier to process the fulfillment side of things. Whether Zoho manages fulfillment or another system, the integration platform should allow integration between multiple systems. Zoho will then update your eCommerce platform with the status of the shipment in real-time. So, the users are informed about the whereabouts of the shipment.

Categories and Products

It is also very common to bring in core product information from Zoho. It typically includes categories, product attributes, and associations, manufacturer part numbers, dimensional weights, descriptions, media, metadata, price, etc. It may also include inventory, distribution center or warehouse location information, store locations, etc.

Omnichannel Ordering

You can enable location data within most eCommerce platforms to handle the omnichannel ordering. It would allow the system to conduct a location and proximity search and manage any transfer items. So, if an end-user wants to transfer an item from one store to another for pickup or wants to order something only available in a warehouse that is far, you can charge an additional shipping fee, etc. Essentially, the integration should be able to conduct intelligence and reasonable data transformations.

Zoho eCommerce Integration Specialists

To conclude, setting up robust core integrations between Zoho and an eCommerce platform will allow you to adjust the system as your business grows. So, you can continue to improve your offering to end-users, reduce costs, and increase your profitability as a business.

Therefore, we strongly recommend working with a partner who offers all the capabilities mentioned above. It would be ideal if you find someone who knows how to cater to your specific business model. So, your customers and your internal team members get the integration outputs that they are expecting.

If you have any more questions related to this topic, we encourage you to reach out to our experienced team. The Clarity team has an amiable and knowledgeable sales and business development staff. They can provide a complimentary analysis. We certainly look forward to answering your questions and talking with you about your upcoming Zoho integration project.

We also encourage you to go through the resources below. They have helpful information that covers other topics related to Zoho and external integrations, some of which can be helpful for your project. If there are topics that you do not see below, you are welcome to click on the ask the expert link. Our team will be happy to provide a technical response to any questions that you may have regarding those topics.