In the fast-paced world of eCommerce, speed and time are everything. eCommerce software providers are constantly looking for ways to streamline their processes and offer faster, more efficient solutions for their customers. However, when it comes to building native integrations with eCommerce platforms, many software providers face unexpected challenges that can actually slow down their SaaS development and time to market.
In this article, we’ll find out and explore why building and developing native integrations with eCommerce platforms may be slowing your SaaS growth, and how alternatives, such as API2Cart, can help you overcome these challenges by offering faster, powerful, reliable and more scalable solutions for integrating with multiple eCommerce platforms.
What are Native Integrations with eCommerce Platforms?
Native integrations with eCommerce platforms are direct and built-in connections between software or applications and an eCommerce platform. These integrations allow two systems to interact and exchange data seamlessly, without the need for third-party tools or services.
For eCommerce software providers, native integrations enable the software to directly access, synchronize and manage data, such as products, orders, customers, inventory, and shipments from eCommerce platforms, such as Shopify, WooCommerce, Magento, BigCommerce, and others.
Why Native Integrations with eCommerce Platforms Are Holding Back Your SaaS Growth
Although the native integrations promise a seamless data synchronization between your software and eCommerce platforms, they are associated with complexities of their own, which could make progress slow. The process may be time consuming and resource intensive, whether it involves the management of frequent platform updates, complex data mapping and troubleshooting.
In addition, native integrations often require continuous maintenance, as any changes made by the eCommerce platform may require updates on your side, leading to increased development cycles and costs.
Here is a list of the main reasons why building native Integrations with eCommerce platforms is slowing your SaaS growth:
1. Complexity of Managing Multiple Integrations
Every eCommerce platform has its own APIs, data structures and technical requirements. When you decide to integrate natively across multiple platforms, your development team will be challenged to create and support specific solutions to each platform. This adds more complexity to the architecture of your SaaS, which becomes more difficult to manage and scale.
As an example, Shopify and WooCommerce can appear to be similar, but they have very different APIs and data models. This implies that your development team will have to modify and adapt the integration to the respective needs of each platform, which will increase the development cycles and the risk of mistakes.
2. Constant Platform Updates and Changes
The eCommerce platforms are constantly upgrading their systems, adding new features, or modifying their APIs. Native integrations cause your software to be reliant on the ongoing changes of every platform. Any change to an API, feature deprecation, or updates to security protocols requires your team to rework the integration to ensure compatibility.
This ongoing maintenance is a time-consuming and resource-intensive process that tends to slow down the SaaS development process and risks the emergence of technical debt. The result? The rate of development of your SaaS is reduced, and the expenses that are required to maintain everything operating well may increase rapidly.
3. Data Mapping and Synchronization Challenges
Among the most complex aspects of the native integrations is the data mapping because eCommerce platforms deal with a great variety of important store data, such as orders, products, and customers, and shipments. Nonetheless, each platform can structure this data differently, and your integration will have to transform and synchronize information across systems in real-time.
This synchronization can be quite complicated logic to make data flow in the right direction across platforms. Any minor mapping or data synchronization error can cause inconsistencies or malfunctions in such important processes as order fulfillment or inventory control. The more platforms you integrate with, the harder it will be to ensure consistency and accuracy between your systems, a situation that may hurt the reliability and performance of your SaaS.
4. Longer Time-to-Market
Building native integrations with eCommerce platforms can increase your time-to-market by a very large margin. Any integration that you develop involves a lot of planning, development, testing, and troubleshooting. Such delay may not allow you to roll out new features very fast or to respond quickly to the market requirements.
For example, imagine you're developing a shipping solution that integrates with five different eCommerce platforms. In order to launch the SaaS in time, your team will have to first integrate with all five platforms, which might take months depending on the complexity of the API of each platform. Such delay does not only affect your SaaS schedule but can lead to opportunities missed as well since your competitors might release similar solutions earlier.
5. Increased Maintenance Burden
As soon as the initial integration is operational, the maintenance work may rapidly become overwhelming. As your software scales and you add more eCommerce platforms to your integration list, the technical debt compounds. With each new feature or platform, the maintenance workload increases, and the number of resources needed to make sure that all is going well increases.
Also, you will have to spend resources on monitoring and troubleshooting any problems that will emerge with your native integrations with eCommerce platforms. This ongoing maintenance needs attention and may deprive you of the time to concentrate on innovation or to develop your SaaS.
6. The Cost of Custom Development
Native integrations with eCommerce platforms can be costly in terms of custom development. Each integration must be built specifically for each eCommerce platform, which means more time spent by your software developers. These custom solutions are more expensive initially and in the process of expanding your business, the cost of sustaining these integrations also rises.
To address the growing complexity of these integrations, hiring more developers to deal with the growing complexity further increases the financial strain. In the long run, building and maintaining native integrations with eCommerce platforms can become an expensive and unsustainable approach, especially for growing software providers.
How API2Cart Can Help Optimize eСommerce Integrations
While native integrations present many challenges, there is a solution that can significantly reduce the complexity and time required to integrate with multiple eCommerce platforms - API2Cart. It offers a unified API that allows you to integrate your software with 60+ eCommerce platforms and marketplaces, including Shopify, WooCommerce, Magento, BigCommerce, Etsy, Wix, TikTok Shop, Shopee, and more, at once, without the need to build custom integrations for each one.
Here’s an example: Creating a product on Magento 2 and WooCommerce native API requires multiple requests, while with API2Cart only one unified request is needed.
API2Cart offers 100+ powerful API methods to get, add, update and sync store data like orders, products, customers, categories, shipments, etc. These methods allow your software to develop functionalities, including managing product data, processing orders, updating inventory, handling customer information, and managing shipments.
With API2Cart unified API your client base expands as you are able to expand the list of supported platforms without necessarily having to hire more developers or contractors. Moreover, since API2Cart handles platform updates, security patches, and troubleshooting, your team can concentrate on building core capabilities rather than managing integrations.
Start your FREE 14-day trial with API2Cart today and experience seamless integrations across 60+ eCommerce platforms! Unlock the power of 100+ API methods to implement valuable store data management features for your clients.
Conclusion
Although native integrations with eCommerce platforms natively might seem like a good concept in the short term, they usually introduce additional complexity, increased costs and lengthy development times. The urgent maintenance, the necessity to work with the platform updates, and the difficulties of data alignment may slow your SaaS growth, and you will not be able to move fast and effectively.
Time, money and effort that you would save with API2Cart can be channeled into the innovation and improvement of your software, which can make you remain competitive in the market. Instead of using the resources to maintain the integration, you can now focus on the new tools, features, and services that directly benefit your customers.
Top comments (3)
very intresting
Very useful article!
Good read — it clearly shows why building native integrations can actually slow down SaaS growth.