Realize a Fast, Tangible Return-On-Investment (ROI) By Integrating Your Shopping Cart And Accounting System

Cold hard facts, we all respect them. When they are against us, they are hard to argue. When they are on our side, they give us confidence in our decision making. Such benefits with regard to eCommerce integrations are widely touted, but factual support in the form of ‘cold hard facts’ are almost always conspicuously absent. If you have been contemplating the integration of your web store with your QuickBooks or Sage 50 accounting system, here is a hard statistic that should help:

“If you manually enter 17 (or more) Web orders per day, an investment in CartSpan will pay for itself in only 2 weeks.”

Is eCommerce integration right for you? This is a logical entry point for a business seeking a fast tangible return on their investment. Some CartSpan users import 200-300 orders per day in their peak season; which translates to a ridiculously high ROI. If you are a smaller business, closer to the 17 orders/day volume of transactions, you will likely only re-deploy resources to more value-added activities.

If you you process an exceptionally high volume of transactions on a daily basis, the cost-reduction can be dramatic. Says CartSpan user Lisa Foster, owner of www.snapsac.com, “With CartSpan, payment reconciliation of my merchant accounts takes less than one hour, whereas before it took at least one or two business days. Because of this, my books are much more accurate in far less time. I’ve trimmed my office staff by one full time position from the savings in time needed for bookkeeping.”

Shirley Byard of Best Business Strategies is a Sage Certified Consultant and user of CartSpan. She indicates that, “CartSpan saves me at least 10 minutes of labor processing per order.” Most employers that we consult with would agree that this is a conservative estimate. Considering the average salary for an Entry-Level Accounting Clerk , this represents a two-week return-on-investment for any business processing approximately 17 or more orders per day.

Though more challenging to assess, the impact of timely inventory updates also represents opportunity for tangible returns. Most merchants reflect an availability status in the shopping cart based upon stock levels. When the stock management logic in the cart consumes that last item, the status will typically reflect ‘Out-of-Stock’ to the consumer. This message will present whether or not you actually have a warehouse full of stock and simply haven’t had the time to update this and the other 1,000’s of items you sell. When the consumer sees this condition, they will simply hit the ‘back’ button on the browser and visit the next option presented by the search engine. As the business owner, only you can ‘guestimate’ how much incremental margin from lost sales you could apply to this return calculation.

Regardless of you measure return, an eCommerce accounting integration helps your business run more smoothly and accurately. If you measure return in ‘grey hairs’, a product like CartSpan can help you avoid the hair products just a little longer… and who couldn’t use a little less stress in their life?!