It’s a dog eat dog e-commerce world, where survival of the fittest is the name of the game. Amazon, wisely, took the friendly approach of helping e-tailers succeed by allowing them to engage and sell on its advanced marketplace platform years ago—taking a slice of each sale along the way, instead of gobbling up the competition. Another early innovator, eBay, went the route of online auctions, ultimately caving and allowing sellers to host robust stores with “buy now” options. For most retailers, if you’re selling using a service like Shopify to host your online store, you also likely have a presence on these two popular sales channels as well.

While e-commerce has come a long way, marketplaces like Amazon and eBay are not cross-channel friendly. That’s because these marketplaces don’t really want your other sales channels to talk to them; after all, they don’t get a cut of the sales revenue if you’re not selling on their platform. This is one of the best reasons to integrate a multichannel Shopify CRM into your marketing plan. What follows are a few other ways that software such as this can help you stay ahead of the game when selling online.

Consolidating Cross-Channel Data

As we’ve just mentioned, it’s not in the best interests of third-party marketplaces like Amazon and eBay to allow your sales channels to all talk to each other. But that doesn’t mean you can’t link them all up with the right CRM. Newer, multichannel solutions connect all your sales channels and instantly import the data into one central dashboard.

Using this data, you can better compare your sales numbers, shipping, and returns, while more easily identifying trendsetters and learning more about the habits and patterns of your customers. You can use this data to make small improvements to your product selection, returns policy and shipping methods, so you can win over more customers by getting a complete view of their journey.

Enhancing Customer Service

CRM is all about building relationships and improving them or maintaining them. The same is true with a Shopify CRM. Instead of viewing your customers as just another invoice or number, you can put a name and face to each sale that comes in. This is accomplished via instant data import and the creation of customer profiles from the e-commerce order activity.

Imagine being able to immediately pull up a customer’s profile while having instant access to every order, invoice, tracking number, sales receipt, return and timeline in their history. What about having the ability to add custom notes, tags and even team tasks and more to each profile. Can you imagine how this will help you improve customer service and relationships across the board?

Personalizing The Customer Experience

Customers demand more from the online stores they buy from these days. Personalization is the key to winning over more long-term customers. Another way that CRM helps you deliver on the promise of a better online shopping experience is the ability to personalize your message to each customer.

Imagine being able to generate automatic emails that wish customers a happy birthday and offer a special discount or bonus product if they place an order from you that day. What about being able to cull data that tells you what customers are buying the most of, what items are popular and knowing what sorts of things to offer them in seasonal flash sales and newsletters as a result to increase average order value and click-throughs. The sky is the limit, but it’s only attainable with the right data, something that a CRM can deliver in real-time.

CRM for e-commerce services like Shopify is still in its infancy. But a quick look at the myriad of benefits being offered is telling. Being able to add a tool like this to your marketing lineup can enable you to maintain strong relationships with new and existing customers, giving you the upper hand against your competitor.