Tools
Salesforce is a CRM that should be familiar to most people who have ever worked with it. The tool is mainly aimed at medium-sized and large companies and has managed to convince entire agencies to dedicate their entire business model to this CRM.
For e-commerce businesses, or businesses that do at least part of their business through an online shop, Salesforce is a great choice. Because a cloud-based CRM, like Salesforce's, complements your webshop software, especially Shopify, WooCommerce or Magento, perfectly.
Because by integrating Salesforce with your online shop, you can always keep the most important data, namely that of your leads and customers, up-to-date and correct in the right place. How? By linking both applications, shop and CRM. This is called Salesforce integration.
Advantages of your Salesforce integration with your online shop:
Because through Salesforce's API (interface) we can connect the CRM with a lot of different tools, but there are also many possibilities for small automations that take over administrative tasks in Salesforce.
This gives your team significantly more time for value-adding tasks.
The principle is always the same: The interfaces provided by Salesforce and your online shop are used. In this way, both applications are connected to each other and can exchange data independently. This approach remains the same, regardless of whether you use native automations or third-party solutions. But what exactly does that mean?
Excursus: Native vs. external automations
The idea of connecting applications that use the same data is not entirely new. Many of the large software manufacturers have long understood this. Salesforce, Shopify or Magento, for example, offer extensions via their own marketplaces that are specialised in other applications. With one click, you can add these functions to your Salesforce CRM or online shop.
Some apps go even further and you don't have to add anything: The project management tool Clickup, for example, comes with small workflow automations right from the start.
What exactly these native automations look like differs in some cases. In the case of Shopify, for example, you pay monthly for Salesforce Sync via the Shopify App Store. With Magento, you get the Salesforce CRM integration for a one-time fee of $420 via the Magento Marketplace. So if you want to integrate Salesforce with your online shop, you will probably have to pay extra.
The alternative is external automation via third-party platforms: In this post we refer in particular to Zapier and Make. Both are applications that have made it their task to connect apps. To do this, they provide a platform and intuitive interface. You can then integrate Salesforce with the online shop of your choice.
The advantage here lies especially in the functionalities: both Zapier and Make offer tons of possibilities to integrate Salesforce with your online shop. And even beyond that, they offer numerous possibilities to integrate other applications, such as your emails or databases, into the automation.
In addition, the costs are lower in the long run. Depending on the plan, you can use Make for as little as $9 per month, apart from the free version, which is also available at Zapier.
Especially if you plan to use Salesforce and your online shop in the near future, we recommend external automations. These run stably, long-term and are also highly scalable should your requirements increase or change.
WooCommerce is the e-commerce plugin of choice for Wordpress sites. WooCommerce is particularly suitable for small to medium-sized shops, especially if your Wordpress website is the core of your business. WooCommerce is especially great for businesses that are just getting started with online sales. For example, if you have just started selling your products or services online due to the pandemic, WooCommerce is a good solution.
Since WooCommerce is a plugin for Wordpress and therefore always bound to Wordpress, the native integrations are also limited. Most likely, you will not get around another Wordpress plugin or an external automation. Basically, we advise against too many Wordpress plugins. On the one hand, it can slow down your website, on the other hand, certain plugins do not understand each other and lead to errors.
Fortunately, however, there are numerous integrations for Salesforce and your WooCommerce online shop that can be implemented via third-party platforms:
Basically, these are all very simple automations. The special thing about the Salesforce integration with WooCommerce using Zapier or Make, however, is actually the processes beyond that: accounting, warehouse management, marketing, administration or product development can all be integrated and thus benefit from automations.
As you can see, Salesforce integration is mainly about synchronising data. In the case of online shops, the most important data is (probably) the master data. This is why it is always automatically transferred from WooCommerce to Salesforce and vice versa.
Magento is the cloud shop system from Adobe and is particularly suitable for medium-sized and large companies. What makes Magento special is its size. Magento runs stable even if you offer tens of thousands of products and allows very detailed differentiations, categories, tags and filters. In addition, you can also programme custom in Magento and thus make all your ideas come true.
In Magento, data on contacts, leads, products, invoices, deliveries, credit notes or returns are particularly relevant for your Salesforce CRM. It is precisely at these points that the integration of Magento with Salesforce can bring added value.
Magento also has its own extension for Salesforce integration. This is available via the Magento Marketplace as an open source version from $420. With it you can then, for example:
Various synchronisation modes are available: Automatically, at intervals or manually.
Automation with Make or Zapier can also provide you with all this. But also much more. Because in addition to the synchronisation of contacts, leads, products, invoices or deliveries, both platforms offer more comprehensive functions.
Map all the above synchronisations
Attach your accounting to your shop system and CRM to automatically generate invoices.
Send newsletter campaigns to selected contacts depending on order and products
Connect your inventory management system to keep track of your stock, automatically reorder products and receive regular evaluations
Shopify is one of the largest e-commerce softwares in the world that enables small and medium-sized businesses to open, manage and develop their own shop. Paired with Salesforce as one of the best-known CRMs, the result is a truly powerful infrastructure.
Shopify scores particularly well with its user-friendliness, flexibility and scalability. In addition, the shop system in this list offers the best API interface, which is decisive for successful and stable automation.
If you want to integrate Shopify with Salesforce, the Shopify App Store offers you a Salesforce Sync. This can be purchased flexibly. For example, you can:
Behind the extension is the third-party provider CRM Perks, which also offers the WooCommerce plugin for the Salesforce integration, for example. The Shopify Salesforce integration starts at $19 per month for up to 100 orders or customers. That should be reached pretty quickly for most people. So the plugin can get pretty expensive pretty quickly.
Especially with Shopify, it is worthwhile in our eyes to use Make or Zapier. Both platforms are significantly cheaper (even in the long term) and offer more functions.
Insider tip: You can even save yourself some other expensive Shopify apps by using them. We have a post about it here.
Implement all of the above, especially the synchronisation of orders, leads, contacts or customers between Shopify and Salesforce.
Integrate your newsletter marketing into the process and automatically add new leads to a campaign.
Integrate your accounting to automatically create invoices, create contacts in the accounting tool, add payment information or even automatically send reminders.
Integrate a database as an intermediate step and have the current sales figures displayed transparently and at any time.
Automatically check your inventory and integrate your stock management so that a product is always reordered on time and based on different criteria, such as seasonality or popularity.
Remind abandoned shopping carts or even retarget customers on other platforms, such as Facebook.
Be notified via Slack, Teams or email when general or specific orders have been placed by products or people.
Salesforce relies on up-to-date data so that your CRM can actually manage your customer relationships. If you run an online shop, this is often where you get the most up-to-date and important data on your leads and contacts. That's why integrating Salesforce with your online shop, whether it's Shopify, Magento or WooCommerce, can bring significant benefits.
You can be sure that master data is always up to date, you can use it in different places in different applications, trigger entire processes for marketing, administration, accounting or inventory management and all this without ever copying and pasting data again.
Cloud Integration, iPaaS, SaaS, BPA… Ough, hard to keep track of all these terms. They are currently used frequently (and increasingly) in the context of automation, and it is sometimes difficult to make a clear distinction and distinction. We have already written blog posts on the terms iPaaS, SaaS and BPA, but we’ll take them up again here to make the difference.
But let’s start with cloud integration, because that’s the central umbrella term in which we embed all the other technologies in this blog post.
Arrange a free cloud integration consultation now
Arrange a free cloud integration consultation now
To illustrate these advantages, an example is suitable that we know well from our everyday work as an automation agency:
The central data to be used here is the data of a major customer. This can be the simplest information, such as the address. This address is required in numerous but completely different processes in the company: on the one hand, for correct invoicing in accounting. On the other hand, in the CRM system, where all the data of the large customer is also stored. But the address is also important in sales, for example, when employees go to the sales meeting on site.
Now the customer announces that the address of the company has changed after a move. This information will reach you by e-mail. There are now two options:
01. The e-mail is forwarded to all affected departments, accounting, sales, customer service, marketing… All persons open their corresponding program, CRM, accounting software, marketing tools (such as newsletter marketing) and change the data already stored there of the customer. This means that in multiple applications, different people do exactly the same thing: change one address.
02. But there is also an alternative: By connecting your applications, thus by integrizing them, the customer’s e-mail, or rather the information it contains about the address change, is automatically passed on to all affected applications: CRM, accounting, marketing, ERP. This does not require any clicks, because the cloud integration detects a trigger, i.e. address change, and thus automatically starts the process.
What sounds unimpressive in a single process becomes more effective when such a process occurs several times a day or weekly. Because there is a lot of data that is available in different applications and should always be correct. If these applications are cloud applications they are suitable for cloud integration.
But cloud integration doesn’t just happen. There are now a variety of applications that enable and implement this. Such tools usually allow us to link the relevant cloud applications on a central platform and define clear rules on when, how, where, how much data should be passed on and what happens to them.
To realize cloud integration, there are various applications and technologies that are sometimes used interchangeably.
We have made a first distinction between iPaaS and BPA here.
We explain the term SaaS in more detail here.
Cloud integration is rather an umbrella term that includes numerous technologies, such as SaaS, iPaaS and BPA, and this is also absolutely necessary. Cloud integration is a concept that is made possible by appropriate technologies.
However, all terms share the commonality that they are cloud-based and thus offer enormous potential for growth and scaling. In addition, they are often cheaper to implement and maintain because changed requirements are easy to implement.
As an independent automation agency, we implement cloud integration according to your requirements. We use a variety of SaaS tools and iPaas (strictly speaking BPA) software. Together we find individual solutions that are flexible and scalable.
