by VL OMNI

There’s no question that the face of commerce has and continues to quickly evolve, with little indication of this pace of change slowing any time soon. Globally, eCommerce and multichannel retailers are now challenged with marrying corporate strategy with the right mix of applications and tools to power their business, all while focusing on creating a customer experience that keeps shoppers coming back time and time again.

There’s no question that the face of commerce has and continues to quickly evolve, with little indication of this pace of change slowing any time soon. Globally, eCommerce and multichannel retailers are now challenged with marrying corporate strategy with the right mix of applications and tools to power their business, all while focusing on creating a customer experience that keeps shoppers coming back time and time again.

Part of that essential mix? A driven, cutting-edge eCommerce agency to create a front-end online store that’s functional and fashionable, and an experienced technical integrator to tie the threads together on the back-end.

Agile, Fashionable and Functional eCommerce Sites

While there are plenty of agencies serving the eCommerce space that approach selling online as a front-end function only, you need an agency that rises above the rest in their understanding of the marriage between a fashionable customer-facing eCommerce website and a robust technology stack. Together, the two sides of any eCommerce business come together to provide that pinnacle of customer experience: that carefully balanced intersection of functionality and form.

****Part of building a strategically sound eCommerce website and matching experience is matching a great front-end customer experience with a technical stack of applications that can fulfill on the promise of that great customer experience. Two complementary sides of the same coin, it’s absolutely crucial that you have both to build and maintain a strong brand over time.

Agencies

But there’s a growing trend among sophisticated e-tailers and multi channel businesses that’s overlaying the form/function customer experience. Business need mastery over both, but any good agency can realise the crucial need for agility as it relates to both sides of the business. There’s a poignant need for businesses to be able to quickly adapt both their front-facing and back-end strategies to the ever-changing market and customer preferences.

Partnering with a top-tier marketing agency not only has your business covered from a visual and customer experience standpoint, but also brings all the power of Shopify and Shopify Plus to your business. As a best-in-breed eCommerce cart that prides itself in staying cutting-edge and agile in not only its core platform, but in all the partners they surround themselves with, Shopify Plus already brings a good measure of agility to the table.

But on the technical back-end of your company, things get a bit more complex and harder to arrange strategically. Coming back again to the focus on keeping your business agile and responsive to changing tides and trends, the most important thing is to structure your back-end applications in such a way that you can add, remove and modify apps, trading partners, channels and more quickly -- and without having to disassemble and reassemble everything every single time.

Shopify

This is where partnering with a best-of-breed data integration solution provider like VL OMNI is extremely important. While applications may come and go, and trading partners and sales channels are almost always in flux, your business’ agility comes down to how you arrange and tie all your applications and channels together. A data integration expert like VL approaches data integration as a strategic function of your business, arranging all your applications in a spoked manner around a centralized hub (usually the application that’s the ‘brain’ of your business, like an ERP).

Data is automated between this hub and the spoke applications that take your business rules into account for true, 100% integration (no field matching or manual manipulation required!). But it’s this strategic arrangement and how the integrations are designed that keep your business agile: adding trading partners can be as simple as duplicating workflows, and changing the arrangement of your back-end technology suite becomes as easy as an exchange of integrations.

High-quality data integration also means plenty to your business beyond agility. For customers of VL OMNI, our data integration platform and dashboard also provides full visibility into data movement between all of your integrated applications in a single view.

Data Automated

This becomes extremely important as channels and trading partners multiply; instead of having to log in to each individual dashboard, you can log in to VL OMNI’s Dashboard to get a unified view with the added ability to edit your data in the dashboard itself if needed. VL OMNI also boasts near real-time data movement, and the aforementioned ability to apply your business’ specific rules right to the data transformation itself, meaning no more manual data manipulation at either end of the integration.

So surround your business with strategic, best-of-breed partners on both your front and back ends: as certified partners of Shopify Plus, you’re in good company with both an agency like Statement and a data integration solution provider like VL OMNI.

About VL OMNI

Accelerate growth with VL OMNI. VL provides agile and scalable SaaS data integration to scaling upper SMB and enterprise-level omnichannel business across a number of sectors, including omnichannel retail. Over 200 businesses trust VL OMNI, an agile point to multi-channel integration middleware platform, to move data seamlessly through their infrastructure as they grow, expand and accelerate their business. Accelerate growth with VL OMNI: Your trusted integration platform for real-time accurate customer order data, shipment details, inventory, and prices. Learn more about VL OMNI at www.VLOMNI.com.

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