Integrating salesforce with website: pros and cons

Salesforce is one of the world’s most popular customer relationship maintenance and inventory management software. This solution is being used across the world by more than 1,00,000 users for streamlining their product sales operations, and for maintaining a seamless integration between sales and supply chain departments in an organization. However, in the era of web-based commercial operations, a major chunk of marketing and turnover generation becomes the responsibility of the business’ website. In such a scenario, the emerging need of the hour is to integrate your Salesforce software with your website to achieve better sync and cohesion between relevant operations of your enterprise. The solution can be easily made to work in consonance with your website using third party integration software. However, there are certain pros and cons that you must consider before moving forward with this plan. Here is a brief analysis of all the factors that may affect your decision to integrate Salesforce with website of your internet business:

Integrating Salesforce with website: Pros

• This integration will offer you with an extremely fast update of current inventory levels based on the sales you have made via your e-commerce channels. This will help in managing your supply chain, production levels and inventory flow in a more streamlined manner with respect to current demand levels on your web based sales platform.

• Salesforce is a robust software that offers a wide variety of customization in terms of creating different fields in your product descriptions, drop down menus, check boxes and pick lists to make inventory data entry and display easy and efficient.

• Salesforce is mainly focused on helping businesses with inventory management. Integration with your website will offer 360-degree view of your stock data including age, pricing, sales tracking and lead management options.

• The integration will also allow you to manage your product data display and tweak it from SEO perspectives, while providing filtering and sorting options as well for creating a more comprehensive and intuitive usage experience for buyers.

• One of the best parts about Salesforce is that it is completely mobile friendly. This ensures that your website will remain responsive and SEO friendly while giving you full on-the-go access to your inventory data via mobile and tablet devices.

• Salesforce integration with your website will allow you to easily update your product data for better conversions of customers. You can add images, documents, details and pricing information quite easily using the software interface and sync inventory levels on a real-time basis to display availability information to help customers with placing orders.

• Integration of Salesforce with website will also provide you with important webpage analytics that will help you in optimizing your conversion metrics and generating more turnover from your e-commerce channels.

Integrating Salesforce with website: Cons

• The integration will require you to find a reliable third-party app that will provide a viable interface between Salesforce and your website

• The entire project will demand a certain level of investment at your end, both for Salesforce as well as the third-party integration app that will be necessary to execute your endeavors.

• Your website and internal business operations might require some tweaking to get everything to fall in-step with Salesforce.

Considering all the above listed factors, integration of Salesforce with your website will serve largely as a beneficial alternative for your business. What do you think?

About The Author:

Mark Lum is President and Founder of LUM.NET Internet Strategies. Mark leads a team of technical and design professionals to achieve optimal results for LUM.NET's clients. With over 20 years of experience in technology, business management and entrepreneurship, Mark relishes the opportunity to introduce new technology for increased sales and cost efficiency. LUM.NET understands the notion of "man vs machine" when it comes to search engines and he accepts that challenge. Mark has an MBA with a concentration in Strategic IT.

Mark Lum is President and Founder of LUM.NET Internet Strategies. Mark leads a team of technical and design professionals to achieve optimal results for LUM.NET's clients.