Online Business & E-Commerce Blog

TOOLKITE IS THE ROSETTA STONE OF E-COMMERCE DATA

A powerful platform to unify and automate data across your e-commerce business

LAS VEGAS, NV - Mar. 19, 2018 — E-commerce apps don’t speak the same language. Mid-market and enterprise e-commerce businesses use dozens of apps to run their business, all of which have their own methods of storing and sharing data. Without a powerful team of developers and data managers on staff, there’s no straightforward way to integrate and surface insights from customer data at scale. This holds companies back from making better purchasing, hiring, and marketing decisions. Toolkite fixes that.

Toolkite helps e-commerce companies share data between the apps they’re already comfortable using. This allows companies to create custom automations to replace the repetitive tasks that most e-commerce companies are forced to do manually when managing inventory, 3PLs, sales channels, accounting, etc.

It’s no secret, e-commerce has seen a dramatic increase of new technology and fantastic software over the past five years. These new apps and tools are designed to meet very specific needs for online retailers and propel them into new levels of productivity and profitability. Cloud based models make it easier than ever to purchase, implement, and love these new powerful apps.

E-commerce companies are increasingly adopting these tools and continuing to use them as they scale. The industry as a whole is moving away from using large, all-in-one commerce platforms to a modular, microservices based architecture - allowing commerce companies to combine the best features of a variety of apps to create their own unique digital customer experience.

Because of these trends, interconnectivity is more important than ever. Is your commerce app able to connect and share data with other apps?

Does your operations team carry the lion’s share of work in keeping your e-commerce business running smoothly? If so, you’re in good company. Managing all of the fulfillment, sourcing, and technology components of a scaling business is a serious undertaking - one that requires help at every turn.

Hiring new team members for each task is expensive and often unrealistic. Sourcing, onboarding, and training new candidates also takes important time from your team.

If you had one more team member, what would you have them do today? Is there a process, initiative, or upgrade that takes higher priority than others?

Can you automate that task?

Technology stacks for growing e-commerce retailers tend to be quite complex. Customer and order data easily gets spread out across your shopping cart, multiple sales channels, inventory managers, marketing platforms, fulfillment providers, and financial reporting tools.

Which of these places serves as your source of truth? If you needed to see all relevant data for a particular customer, where would you go? Do your systems talk to each other, or does customer data live in isolation?

More importantly, if you could have all of the data from your e-commerce business under one roof, what would be the first thing you’d want to learn?

Any E-commerce company who is experiencing rapid growth can attest: the growing pains are most significant for the operations team.

Serving customers on new sales channels, utilizing new fulfillment partners, keeping tabs on best selling products, providing accurate accounting details, and managing product information all have significant costs of time and attention from team members.

Many companies resort to hiring hourly or junior employees to own these initiatives. But the opportunity cost is high here: every hour they spend updating data on a sales channel is an hour that could be spent creating better products or delighting customers.

Lets face it, employees at growing e-commerce companies are stretched in a hundred different directions, and every team member is flooded with responsibilities and challenges. As your company expands, the systems and processes you use to keep your business running can become increasingly outdated. When complexity rises, demands get more pressing, and the orders just keep rolling in, many companies find themselves focused on putting out short term fires instead of setting long term plans.

It’s easy to make quick hires to handle the unexpected complexity of fulfilling orders and satisfying customers, but the truth is that people don’t scale. In order to achieve sustainable growth, you need to automate your online store.