How Customer Data Integration Works in the eCommerce Sphere

Like every other modern business, eCommerce stores require effective customer data management to grow, expand, and take their sales and marketing efforts to the next level. All this customer data is available on the platforms on which these companies and sellers have built their sites. As such, gaining access to this data is also paramount for SaaS business providers that want to help merchants become more successful at selling online.

Understanding how customer data integration in the eCommerce sphere works is vital. Whether you’re offering repricing services, marketing automation, inventory automation, chatbot integration, or warehouse management software, you need to know how to maximize the power of customer data integration to facilitate efficient eCommerce operations for your clients.

What does Customer Data Integration Represent?

Customer data integration is the process of collecting and working with data from various databases, transforming it so it can be easily accessed by anyone and used in their marketing, sales, or production campaigns. The integration of data from multiple sources within a singular system makes it easy for businesses like yours to uncover patterns and perform smart automation.

In our era of online commerce, customer data integration is vital for any SaaS provider looking to grow and expand. More specifically, this process involves retrieving data from various eCommerce platforms such as Magento, Amazon, Shopify, or eBay and organizing it into a single place.

This type of data related to e-store customers can only be gathered from specific eCommerce platforms. Thus, you need to perform an integration between your software and those platforms. Integration is implemented using an API (application programming interface). This process is known as “API integration” and allows two or more systems to communicate with each other, exchanging data with ease.

Why do eCommerce Software Providers need Access to Online Stores’ Customer Data?

At this point, you should know that any eCommerce software provider, be it an abandonment cart software, repricing software, marketing automation, or multichannel system provider, is highly dependent on their customers’ data. Therefore, all of these providers need unrestricted access to their clients’ data to be able to provide their core functionalities to online merchants.

As an example, marketing automation platforms need access to the online store clients’ data in order to perform their main functions, which include:

- Sending emails as updates on store discounts, items, and products

- Tracking each customer’s order history so that the seller can plan their marketing campaigns accordingly

- Notifying the buyer about their order status regularly

All of these functions are core for any marketing automation business. If the company doesn’t have access to the data of its clients, they are unable to perform its core functionalities.

What Type of Customer Data can you Get from eCommerce Platforms?

To be specific, you can gain access to the following type of data:

- Customer email

- Customer id

- Customer wishlist

- Customer email, name, address, and other personal details

- Customer birthday

- Customer order history or preferences

Each type of eCommerce software provider can utilize this data in their campaigns and daily operations. For example, multichannel systems can organize the data collected into a single dashboard and discover the site visitors’ buying patterns, order history, and preferences while also analyzing their relationship with the sellers. They can also use the data to create customized reports that the e-shop’s marketing and management teams can use to uncover patterns and draw trends for future business decisions.

Similarly, marketing automation systems can use data such as customer birthday, name, email, order history, or wishlist to create personalized marketing emails that include recommended products, special offers, and great deals.

Lastly, cart abandonment systems can use customer email, name, and cart info to send personalized follow-up emails to potential customers, encouraging them to finalize their purchase.

How can you Retrieve Customer Data from eCommerce Platforms?

Customer data integration is the process of connecting your software with various shopping platforms with the role of retrieving all the customer data that is important and relevant to you. Nevertheless, integrations are considered to be a time-consuming process, coming with a lot of associated challenges. It definitely takes a lot of time and money to find the right developers for the job, perform onboarding, and then establish a separate integration with each platform.

The great news is that you can avoid all these challenges altogether by using a third-party solution such as API2Cart. With this unified shopping cart data interface, you can benefit from seamless integration with 40+ eCommerce platforms, including Shopify, X-Cart, Amazon, eBay, and WooCommerce. This means no more waiting for individual integrations, costly setup, and extensive maintenance.

To top it all, API2Cart offers no less than 100 API methods for retrieving data, allowing you to gain info about products, descriptions, attributes, accounts, carts, orders, and customers. For accessing information about online store customers, API2Cart has two main methods:

- customer.list: use this method to retrieve a list of customers from the store

- customer.info: allows you to retrieve customers’ private data from the store

You can learn more about how API2Cart streamlines your customer data integration process by contacting the company’s managers.