I wanted to put out a general inquiry to all ECT users to ask about which tools and integrations you have integrated into your the ECT that amplify the productivity or effectiveness of the ECT.

I was hoping to see if any of you guys have implemented integrations with any marketplaces that help sync listings, inventory, and orders between things like Amazon, Ebay, etc. That remains a pain point for us.

PLEASE POST YOURS HERE!
If there is a service or tool you use, let us know! If it works well for you it would likely work well for the rest of us too. Who knows, if there's something really good in here, maybe Vince would make an official integration for us so that everyone could benefit from it.


That said, here's a list of the tools and integrations that we use or have custom coded into the ECT that provide significant value or efficiency to our work flows.
Cloudflare - Setup is straight forward and the value added can be extreme high because it can make your site significantly faster and more user friendly. For a tool that only costs $20 a month for the PRO version, you're robbing yourself if you aren't using this. We allow it to cache almost every page except for cart.asp

Shipstation - The integration needs a FEED setup to send orders to the software and also to accept tracking numbers and order status updates back into the ECT database. From a shipping standpoint, this has saved us a LOT of money and increased efficiency significantly. I think maybe Vince might have already coded this in??

Meta Retargeting - setting up the Meta Pixel tracking took some work, but you can use the data it generates to create a target audience to serve ads to. We have been using it for a few months now for retargeting advertising, and it appears to an efficient ad spend that consistently performs well.

Google Shopping - this took creating a product FEED inside Google Merchant Center. Google CAN scrape your site for products itself, but it's better to make your own feed because it allows you to hand craft how the data is presented to Google. This feed is then called into Google ads and we run ads using that feed. Google shopping has proved to be an efficient ad spend avenue.

Liveagent Chat - https://www.liveagent.com/live-chat-software/ Integration was really easy. It's a pretty simple piece of Javascript that just needs to be loaded on any pages you want this to work. Setting up automatic chat prompts on some pages allows our customer service reps to help customers through critical places like Checkout. Likely any chat software would be able to work well here, but the biggest cost isn't going to be the software, it's going to be the customer service reps who would be able to manage the interactions with the customers consistently.

Paypal (already integrated!) - Listen, I really don't like Paypal, but here's the hard truth. SO MANY PEOPLE want to use it as their payment method. We need to meet customers where they are. Reducing barriers to purchase pays HUGE dividends always.

Square (already integrated!) - as a payment provider, it makes a REALLY nice last cart page integration in the ECT. Their rates have been competitive AND unlike Paypal, they will refund credit card fees if you refund the customer. With Paypal, they'll KEEP your credit card processing fees even if you refund an order. That feels criminal to me. Like I said, I'm not a fan of Paypal. I AM however a huge fan of Square. We have been using them for years with great satisfaction.

Screaming Frog - Crawler that can report on all kinds of facets of your web store that you wouldn't otherwise notice. We use it to hunt down 404 errors, to crawl our site to repopulate Cloudflare caching if we needed to purge cache, to find broken 301s that we should fix. Most of these things you wont ever see without something like a crawler reporting them for you.

http 500 Errors Reporting Page - We programmed a custom page that we instruct the server to execute on a 500 error. This page emails us where the error happened and what the error was. Because we custom code a lot of stuff, this gives us IMMEDIATE feedback if there's an error we didn't see. Yes, the customer was inconvenienced by an error, but at least WE also know about it so we can correct it immediately. Not getting reports of your 500 errors makes you blind to things that are broken.

Dedicated Server - The ECT works REALLY well on their hosting or most any decent VPS. You don't need to think about this if you aren't using the software at scale, but the ECT software is VERY capable at scale on beefy hardware. Like ... VERY capable.

Missing Index Scripts - Not everyone uses the ECT cart software the same way, so sometimes database inefficiencies aren't seen until the software is setup or used in a particular fashion. Years ago, we purchased scripts from this guy and had him walk us through how to run them (requires a dedicated server). We found some indexes that were missing that when installed provided significant improvement in speed to the ECT: https://blog.sqlauthority.com/2011/01/03/sql-server-2008-missing-index-script-download/

Index Maintenance Scripts - Database indexes must be maintained! Monthly log into our server and rebuild indexes that have become fragmented. This keeps that ECT software running at its best. The first time we did this, it was like the ECT had been reborn with youthful vigor.

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Personal pieces of coding. I'm going to list of some things we have coded ourselves over the years. They're EXTREMELY valuable to us, but I cannot help you create them yourselves. They're just here as ideas maybe for Vince or any of yall who are savvy enough to code for the ECT yourselves.

Image Processing Tool - upload a folder of images with the same name as a pID, the code processes through the images, creates the necessary files on the server, resizing, adjusting background opacity, saving in efficient resolutions, updates the database. It's based on this product here. This allows us to process sometimes THOUSANDS of new images with the click of a button. We have created entire workflows around this. https://www.aspjpeg.com/

Barcode Scanning (and Warehouse Binning) - We programmed the order processing page so that it accepts SCANS from a barcode scanner. This matches the scanned products to the order and validates the contents of the order before we package up the order to ship it out. Shipping accuracy is near 100% using barcode scanning. We also integrated it into our warehouse, allowing us to scan inventory in and out of bins so that we can pick orders efficiently.

Product Data Tool - Essentially, an admin side product search tool that can search for ANYTHING using any facet desired. We use it to do things like, find all products IN STOCK that have NO IMAGE - bam, immediate work flow for an employee. This tool is hard to describe completely, but the idea basically is that we can use it to find any product based on any attribute we can think of. When we are managing thousands of products in our database, this makes it easier to find things that would otherwise fall through the cracks.

PLEASE POST YOURS HERE!
If there is a service or tool you use, let us know! If it works well for you it would likely work well for the rest of us too. Who knows, if there's something really good in here, maybe Vince would make an official integration for us so that everyone could benefit from it.

We've found that third-party integrations for inventory and accounting are more trouble than they're worth. Instead, we manage inventory across our stores using Excel.

Each week, we export our Order Details and append them to a master sheet containing our full order history. Other sheets in the workbook track shipments to resellers who don't use our ecommerce store.

We also maintain sheets in the workbook for bills of materials (to break down orders into their component parts), adjustments for damaged returns, sales tax reports, usage reports to allow accurate monthly COGS calculations in QuickBooks, and so on.

Thanks for the reply.

Inventory management is one of the things we couldn't manage with spreadsheets anymore. We needed the ability to scan in / receive inventory and know exactly how much we DIDN"T receive, or things that we received that we weren't expecting. Scanning increases accuracy and speed exponentially.

We have been using StoneEdge for inventory management for years now, but ONLY for the inventory management aspect and even then our integration into the ECT is only skin deep. It almost operates as a completely separate system which is why I didn't mention it in the initial post, but that's a good point to bring up. Inventory management is important.

We manage an inventory of around 150 different component parts, most of which do not have barcodes.

Our warehouse team manually counts high-value parts upon receipt and spot-checks the others by weight.

One sheet in our Excel workbook tracks every purchase order—including PO number, order date, quantity, pricing, shipping cost, and the date and quantity received.

This data feeds into other sheets that generate reports on delivery times, assembly costs, required additional PO quantities, and so on.

These reports have been very reliable, and we’re able to create new ones as needed. For example, during the current tariff dispute, one of our suppliers is concerned about their supply chain. When they requested detailed forecasting, we generated graphs showing up-to-date end-user purchase histories of their components as used in our assemblies—providing a solid basis for their planning.

I have really liked using AWS Serverless Image Handler for all of our images. Its nice because we can upload a single larger image and add filters and variables on the fly to adjust the size, watermark, format (webp), and more. No need to make small, large and giant images. It is similar to services like Imgix, ImageKit, & Cloudinary, but much less expensive - I've never paid more than $3 a month. It takes all of the image handling off our server and puts it on AWS through their CDN.

Oh! That's super cool. I'll have to check that out!