#5 Indicators Showing Why You Need To Adopt Enterprise Ecommerce These figures clearly indicate about the enormous opportunity for eCommerce businesses to grow and succeed.

Worldwide retail eCommerce sales reached $1.915 trillion in 2016 according to the market research firm eMarketer. It also predicted that the sales will reach $4.058 trillion in 2020 which is more than double of what it is now. These figures clearly indicate about the enormous opportunity for eCommerce businesses to grow and succeed.

With the growth of eCommerce industry, eCommerce businesses and stores grow with it. Generally eCommerce web stores use an eCommerce platform to manage and carry out its various operations. The question here is, does the eCommerce platform grow with the growth in business? When a business grows, it requires much more efficiency to operate on a higher scale and every single operation related to the business must operate at maximum efficiency. If the eCommerce platform does not evolve with the growing business, it will be more of a hindrance rather than a support to growth.

Many growing eCommerce businesses have inadequate systems which cannot cope-up with the growth. Business owners don't realize this and keep continuing with the same old inefficient systems which keeps their growth stagnant or worse, results in their downfall. In the initial stages of an eCommerce business, a basic eCommerce software will be just fine but as things progress ahead, it would be foolish to expect the same software to support the growing business.

Growing eCommerce businesses need more than just a basic eCommerce platform, it needs an Enterprise eCommerce platform to grow and succeed. Have you reached a stage where you need to switch to an Enterprise eCommerce platform? Below are the 5 Indicators that suggest if you should make the shift.

You start spending more time on software than your core business activities

One of the most important and clear indicator showing that you need to shift to an Enterprise eCommerce platform is when you start spending more time on trivial software tasks. If an eCommerce business sticks to an old basic eCommerce platform, more and more platform issues will arise. Business start spending more time on platform fixing and integrating things, performing manual operations as the software cannot automate certain operations in a desired manner etc. This is a matter of huge concern as business owners keep themselves busy with these trivial tasks and cannot focus on core business activities.

Your eCommerce platform clearly becomes a big obstacle to your growth and to make the same software work better by integrating it with other software will waste more time and spoil things further. So when your business reaches a certain point of growth, it becomes mandatory for you to make the shift to an Enterprise eCommerce platform.

Integrations do not seem to end

When you started your online business, you thought all you need is an eCommerce store builder that helps you create a basic web store. Soon you realized that you need more functionalities on your web store and started getting multiple extensions to fill the gap. As the business grew, you realized that managing inventory manually is a difficult task and so decided to integrate an inventory management system with your web store. Likewise with the growing business, you got different software to handle Sales, CRM, HR, Shipping and much more. With so many integrations, your overall system loses its core value and getting all these isolated systems to work together becomes a never ending task.

Shifting to a unified Enterprise eCommerce solution frees you from creating such a patch-work system with endless integrations.

Your growth becomes stagnant

Growth lies at the core of every business and businesses simply can't afford to have stagnancy when it comes to growth. Your existing eCommerce platform may have helped you start out well and grow in the initial stages. But after reaching a certain point, it would be incapable of fueling the growth further. You reach a stage where you keep yourself busy with mundane things trying to get things going with the outdated system but cannot see any growth. This is a high time you switch to an Enterprise eCommerce platform and keep your growth graph growing at a pace that it should.

Generating and Using Reports become a headache

Generating various reports is an integral part of every business. In case of an eCommerce business, getting live updates as well as statistical figures from accounting, sales, inventory etc. plays a key role in taking certain critical business decisions. These reports lead to decisions that drives the growth of the business. However in a disintegrated system, generating comprehensive and meaningful reports become a big problem. Isolated softwares are not so good at sharing data with other systems and if you are using multiple isolated softwares that don't communicate well, generating reports and statistics is difficult. You have to manually link things up and produce reports as they cannot be auto-generated and this wastes a lot of time. When you have a unified solution and all under one roof, every component of your system is well connected and hence shares data easily. This helps you in generating meaningful reports quickly and efficiently.