Why you should integrate your e-commerce with an MYOB accounting package!

Imagine being able to easily bring in all your e-commerce shopping cart orders directly into your MYOB accounting software as a sales order thereby reducing the data re-entry time. Yay - No double entry! Imagine being able to have your customer card files updated with your clients details on mass after your customers have logged in to your web site and updated their details. And imagine the time saved by being able to seamlessly transfer updates that you have made about your customers contact details in their MYOB customer card file directly into your e-commerce web store. And finally imagine being able to keep your product pricing and stock levels on your web site up to date in easily.
This is the dream of many an e-commerce store owner but without some well thought out software and a lot of careful planning on how you structure your customer card data and your product data you can be in for a lot of trouble. Where do you put your customer login information and price level instructions. Which fields do we match with MYOB and our own database. The complexity of a seemingly simple database integration has lead to most shopping cart sites abandoning the integration dream. The fact is that in many instance you do need to invest a thousand to several thousands dollars to build a robust, reliable and perfect fit solution for your business. But before you do commit to MYOB integration you need to be able to evaluate at what point it becomes economical to do so.
Let’s do a cost benefit analyses based on processing 20 e-commerce orders a week the old way and the new way.
In the old way we would be spending up to 10 minutes per order re-keying into MYOB the information (printing out the email, logging in for an order). This would equate to 200 minutes a week. Plus we might be updating the contact and login information on our web site 1 hour per week. And we would be updating prices for 1 hour per week. We wouldn’t have time to worry about stock levels so then we would have to sometimes tell unhappy customers we couldn’t supply their product at all because we’d already sold out. Overall that’s a 320 minutes a week or 277 Hours per year. At $20.00 per hour this would cost us $5540 in wages.
Now if we had MYOB integration in place. There would be no rekeying and customer information would be automatically updated as well as product price and stock information.
Time to do this per week. 30 minutes at the worst or $520 per year at the same rates. The difference is $5020.
Now for many small e-commerce businesses the saving of $5020 each year is not the important part because if you freed up another 250 hours a year, the equivalent of just over six 40 hour weeks the small business owner could focus on other areas of their business… like marketing. Or the overworked small business owner could work less, hmmm that would be nice.
So perhaps its time to look again at integrating with your accounting package…

About the Author

Dale Carter runs an ECommerce Web Design Firm in Perth Australia that specialises in shopping cart software and MYOB integration. For details visit http://www.gtp-icommerce.com

by: gtpicommerce
Total views: 14 Word Count: 535 Date: Fri, 10 Oct 2008 Time: 6:10 AM 0 comments