Wave Commerce is a leading Shopify Partner helping clients unlock omnichannel commerce with Shopify POS, CRM, and ERP custom integrations. We’ve tackled complex system integrations from external POS to Salesforce, SAP, and Oracle Netsuite with Shopify. Here are some of our insights on how and why to tackle Shopify omnichannel integrations.

Many businesses today proudly announce they are “omnichannel”, but in reality, they have a patchwork of rough integrations held together like a house of cards. Mostly, the customer experience is still in silos, and customers have to repeat information every time they visit a store, contact online support, etc. Data may be shared between systems, but often it's lacking, missing, inaccurate, or fake (due to spam/wrong data). 

Looking at the end goal, the holy grail of omnichannel retailing starts with unifying customer profiles through a single, coherent customer loyalty platform that can be applied both online (Shopify) and with third-party POS, CRM, and ERP systems.

Why retailers need to tackle Shopify POS integration if they don’t want to get left behind

As a longtime Shopify agency partner, it’s clear to us that the winning brands have done an incredible job with customer engagement - typically with a unified loyalty solution strategy. These brands do an amazing job engaging their customers to create brand affinity, and drive customers to their wholly-owned DTC brand channels to maximize profit and control their brand experience (eg; Shopify online store). 

Doing so effectively starts with unifying customer data and applying the latest CRM, marketing automation, and customer experience platforms to drive personalized and context-driven engagement. 

When a customer’s online Shopify activity is merged and unified with retail POS activity, retailers start to unlock key growth drivers like:

• Customers’ in-store preferences (e.g, what they often buy): Is it different from what they buy online? Does the customer purchase more expensive items offline? Does the customer purchase significantly more offline, and is in fact a VIP missing from your database? All of this data is crucial and can be synced into marketing automation tools for more relevant digital engagement
• Cross-channel pollination: In-store customers can be introduced to a larger product portfolio available online, or online visitors are encouraged to visit in-store retail for better sales support and conversion

How to integrate Shopify with external Point-of-Sale (POS), CRM, and ERP systems?

As the leading commerce platform, Shopify offers a robust set of approaches for setting up POS integrations. These include:

Pre-built default integrations (if any): Many cloud-based POS, CRM, and ERP systems already have a pre-built integration with Shopify. We suggest checking out pre-built integrations if your system offers one already as a first step. Pre-built integrations are usually the most basic, often only syncing customer contact information or order information without reaching into details around metafield or custom fields for business flow integrations (e.g, refunds, cancellations, order splits, etc), so it’s important to drill into whether or not the pre-built integrations support your intended business outcomes.

Custom integrations (API based): Shopify-supported middleware or third-party integrator tools (e.g. iPaaS) are often used to help broker Shopify with key POS, CRM, and ERP systems. This is the preferred approach typically when the external system you wish to integrate with Shopify is a cloud-based solution such as Netsuite or Salesforce. As long as the third-party source systems have reliable web-based API standards (e.g. REST), you can tackle the integration with a custom Shopify app if you do not intend on using third-party integrators. This is often the approach we take for more local POS integrations that have unique API-based integration requirements.

Custom integrations (ETL or file-based): Lastly, there’s always the option of file-based, data exporting, or ETL (Extract, Transform, Load) type of integrations, which is much more manual. This will require more setup on the Shopify side and also require a third-party data extract tool or a custom app to first export data out to a secure file server before running through the rest of the data integration. We often advise our clients to factor in the data transformation requirements between Shopify and the source POS system and assess where and how that data transformation needs to take place.

Key CRM considerations when tackling Shopify with CRM, ERP, and POS integrations to unlock omnichannel commerce

When working with our clients, we often find that the integration focus is on the technical aspects above, around the integration approach and data object level scoping (e.g. are we integrating order data, customer data, or inventory, etc). What gets overlooked is arguably the most critical aspect of POS integration for omnichannel retailing - customer profile unification. In other words, making sure customers, whether they are buying online or in-store, need only to register and create their profile once and have this percolated across channels.

Unfortunately, what we often find is that no such process for ensuring customer profile unification and uniqueness takes place. This results in a single customer having many identities across channels, and integration merely imports/exports order data from one channel into another without truly unlocking the benefits of true omnichannel commerce - such as understanding more about your customers and deep relevant personalization.

Why a unified customer loyalty solution can help retailers unlock omnichannel commerce

OMNI Loyalty, developed by Wave Commerce, approaches customer loyalty from an omnichannel-centric point of view. Omnichannel is baked into our customer onboarding design, a process designed to unify customers across channels (POS and Shopify) so that regardless of what POS, ERP, or CRM solution you’re using, customer merging and enforcement of profile uniqueness is taken into consideration to maximize omnichannel loyalty effectiveness. That way, customers benefit by truly moving seamlessly between your in-store and Shopify online experience with a single member profile with points, rewards, and benefits that can be accessed both online and in-store.

To learn how we help retailers achieve omnichannel integration between retail POS and CRM systems with Shopify, contact us for more information here.