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How Integration Helped Ecommerce Businesses Successfully Navigate Through 2020

by Sarah Kyo
March 3, 2021

COVID-19 forced many retailers to downsize their operations in 2020. On top of that, they had to fulfill increased online orders, including record-breaking Black Friday/Cyber Monday (BFCM) sales. [1] Thanks to automation and integration, some ecommerce businesses were prepared to face this adversity. In this article, find out how eco-conscious natural cosmetics company Gabriel Cosmetics, Inc. successfully navigated through these challenges – and how your team can prepare for this year and beyond.

Do More With Less

Amid all of the changes from the pandemic, Gabriel Cosmetics lost two members of their five-person sales processing team. Additionally, they began seeing many more retail orders – a consumer making an individual order – compared with large orders for grocery stores, natural food stores, and other brick-and-mortar businesses. After implementing their integration solution last summer for their order-to-cash business process, Gabriel Cosmetics still managed to process the same number of orders as before with a smaller headcount.

The real nerve-racking test for the team, though, was BFCM 2020. This was especially crucial after Gabriel Cosmetics’ website crashed during the 2019 holiday weekend. That glitch forced them to manually process over 900 orders while keeping up with customer communications.

Fortunately for Gabriel Cosmetics and the rest of Celigo’s ecommerce customers, we had a perfect BFCM from a performance standpoint.

“We were monitoring it all weekend, and the orders came in smooth, correctly. There was nothing to fix, so when we came in Monday morning, it all started processing right away and met all of our customers’ expectations as far as shipping,” said Jenna Pennamen, Director of Operations at Gabriel Cosmetics, in this on-demand webinar.

3 Key Integration Takeaways

While BFCM is months away, it’s never too early to start preparing. Plus, you can get a head start on reaping the many benefits of optimizing your year-round operations. Based off Gabriel Cosmetics’ use case, here are a few applicable next steps for your team:

  1. Identify areas in your business that could benefit from automation. Prior to the pandemic, Gabriel Cosmetics started turning to digital tools and systems to support their growing sales. For example, they adopted Acumatica for their enterprise resource planning (ERP). Later, they added Shopify for their web storefront in response to 2019 holiday technical difficulties.
  2. Take advantage of pre-built integrations for quickly connecting your applications. Gabriel Cosmetics successfully implemented a pre-built Shopify – Acumatica integration during the height of the pandemic and had the chance to become familiar with it before BFCM.
  3. Find a user-friendly integration solution. After brief training, Jenna and her team can manage their pre-built integration with an integration platform (iPaaS) – no IT or developers needed.

Interested in creating an infrastructure that can handle an increased order volume while helping you scale efficiently?

Check out this ebook, The Executive Guide to Best Practices in Ecommerce Integration.

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