Back-office systems run all your business administration processes. Linking your back-office and online systems together improves efficiency and leads to:

• improved customer service
• faster response times
• enhanced capacity - greater automation = larger volumes of business
• reduced costs in the medium and long term
• improved accuracy - all systems using the same data means errors are reduced
• better use of staff time
• greater customer satisfaction

The integration solution that is right for you will depend on the systems you already have in place. The areas you identify as priorities for technical integration are typically the key processes in your business. Sales, marketing and customer service (CRM), enterprise resource planning (ERP) forecasting, stock control, ordering, accounting systems are all major opportunities for integration.

Integration means connecting your online e-commerce system with your back-office systems, so that whenever a customer places an order online, your web store and back office deal with the sale as one. The online system accepts the order and then relays all this information back to the customer, while the back office records the transaction, adjusts inventory levels, generates an invoice and fulfils the order.

The costs and complexity vary depending on the volume of traffic your website handles and what systems you have in place. It is a question of looking at the systems and processes you already have and considering how much you've spent on them, how well they work for you and how willing you are to move, if at all, to a different solution.

Integration should always be platform independent and written to open standards - which generally means employing XML (extensible mark-up language) or EDI (electronic data interchange). That way it will work with other applications in.

You should also consider whether you want your system to communicate in real time, or through batch processing. Real time communication means that the web store can search the back office for data instantaneously. Batch processing (which is cheaper) means that the back office software and the web store communicate at regular intervals - customers may have to wait a little to get the information or order confirmation they were seeking but most online customers will accept a delay of up to two hours before receiving an e-mail dealing with their requests.