A couple of decades ago, when the digitalization process was taking baby steps, an entirely new sector was evolving simultaneously – e-commerce. Who would have thought that e-commerce would be the new normal in the retail sector? But e-commerce evolved from being just a mere new idea to an industry that is dominating the world today.
Within a few years, this e-commerce sector overlapped traditional marketing, indicating where the retail sector’s future lies. In 2007, e-commerce had accounted for 5.1% of online retail sales and raised to 16% by 2019.
The widespread use of online platforms such as Amazon or eBay resulted in substantial growth in the online retail sector. But over the course of time, it became difficult to manage the businesses online, as they didn’t want to spend their valuable time and money on repetitive tasks. This created the necessity for software that will manage and optimize the e-commerce business efficiently.
Looking to fill this gap, a company was established – SyncSpider. SyncSpider provides a cloud-based multichannel integration tool that helps online retailers to grow revenue.
In an interview with Insights Success, Norbert Strappler, the Founder and CEO of SyncSpider, shared his company’s journey, its experiences, and future perspectives in the online business sector.
Below are the interview highlights
Please brief our audience about SyncSpider, its USPs, and its position as a leading player in the data integration solutions niche.
SyncSpider is an application-to-application integration tool designed to help eCommerce businesses grow revenue using multichannel sales automation. Practically, it helps manage stock in a centralized place, connect with eCommerce tools to sync data, and ultimately create an improved buying experience for customers.
Our mission is to help e-commerce businesses achieve exponential growth. Nowadays, every e-commerce business relies on using a set of complementary marketing apps to better study analytics, interpret data, and create a flawless customer experience. This conventional approach can sometimes be inefficient, time-consuming, and fruitless. E-commerce businesses are losing copious hours on repetitive tasks and manual data synchronization between multiple platforms.
Running a successful business online demands keeping in touch with the latest technological advancements, such as data integration solutions. Well, SyncSpider fits them all into one place. It lets you connect your favorite e-commerce apps to work in sync and build your ideal workflow. No more time and resources are lost on synchronizing never-ending data between multiple platforms.
Today, we pride ourselves on building a rock-solid platform that helps thousands of e-commerce owners earn more by doing less. Or, in our words: work it smarter, sync it better, ship it faster, sell it stronger.
What other products/solutions does SyncSpider offer, and how are these making an impact on the industry and your clients?
Simply put, SyncSpider operates like a centralized nervous system. We help e-commerce businesses integrate and synchronize their favorite tech stack into one platform. Once you connect your favorite apps together, SyncSpider automates the transfer of data and execution of repetitive tasks so you can focus on conquering new marketplaces and winning customers.
Essentially, SyncSpider is an ideal platform for medium to large size webshops and e-commerce agencies that are managing a lot of clients. Our recent study showed that some of our agency partners have seen up to 80 hours a week saved with the automation and workflows they’ve set up for their clients.
We understand that running an e-commerce business is a great challenge. Every day, hundreds of new apps are being introduced in the digital realm, so choosing the right stack for your e-commerce business can be quite complicated. Apart from being able to choose from over 300 pre-built integrations in our catalog, we also provide setting up custom workflows for our clients. No one should suffer wasting countless hours on copy-pasting endless data between multiple apps.
Being an experienced leader, share with us your opinion on the impact of the adoption of modern technologies such as AI and machine learning on the data integration solutions niche, and what more could be expected in the future?
I consider myself a strong advocate of the old saying – “work smarter, not harder.” Let’s be honest. When it comes to machine learning and AI, the truth is that many of us are still in the dark and falling behind on how this technology is being used in everyday business operations.
AI will reduce manual labor and time wastage by humans, which results in improved efficiency. There’s no doubt about it. However, not all AI-based technologies are useful and scalable, and hence, there is a serious need to evaluate which AI technology is worth considering for your business.
When it comes to intelligent use of data integrations, AI is expected to greatly complement the human touch in the business scenario. As always, humans will have to acquire valuable information, and this will make sure the data is properly curated before a decision is taken on it. Over time, AI is expected to offer intelligent recommendations based on contextual data. This will help the business users in saving time and increasing their output.
So how can the business understand the importance of AI? You (might) ask?
Well, businesses use different languages to express their needs, which is followed by a lack of inter-cultural understanding. AI is the bridge between the business and the users by giving key insight into the customers’ needs.
There is no direct connection between the degree of adoption of AI and the business value that will be generated. However, we can identify certain drivers of AI adoption for businesses in the long-term – the priority of marketing campaigns, adoption of cloud-based business applications, hardware acceleration of apps, speed and accuracy of decision-making, and improving the customer experience, etc.
In simple words, try to identify the barriers to adoption – it’s important to understand how the AI solution will impact the way you will run your business and what is it that makes your business stand apart from its competition. This will help you to identify the immediate steps required to move ahead.
Taking into consideration the current pandemic, what initial challenges did you face, and how did you drive your company to sustain operations while ensuring the safety of your employees at the same time?
SyncSpider has always been a fully remote company. We believe that a quality workforce can be found anywhere, and all employees should have the flexibility to set up their own work schedules. Our employees have the freedom to organize work from their home, a personal office, or any other favorite spot. Today, we’re proud of assembling a multi-cultural workforce that shares the same vision and values.
The biggest legacy of COVID-19 is probably the increase in remote work. Like any other company, SyncSpider was not immune to the initial COVID-19 implications. The safety of our employees always comes first, so we’ve made sure to adjust our daily operations, strategies, and goals to be perfectly aligned with the general availability of our workforce and the impact that COVID-19 has had on their lives.
Our employees have the freedom to adjust their own schedules and take as many days off as needed at any given time. This way, we’ve managed to reduce the potential stress that comes naturally in such circumstances and increase the convenience and pleasure of working remotely. Despite the recent economic turbulence, SyncSpider managed to swim against the current by growing our remote workforce to almost 30 employees.
What would be your advice to budding entrepreneurs who aspire to venture into the data integration solutions market?
In order to do your job well as a business owner, the data workflow from all of your departments need to be integrated into a single nervous system. Simply put, you need to have access to the right data at the speed of light in order to make better decisions.
Data integration enhances the speed at which you can put new systems in place. You can move faster and more easily with the right systems and the right information. It also helps keep your team on track and working toward the same goal. This is why data integration is critical to business success.
With data integration, you can avoid problems like duplicate data, misused information, and other problems that can slow you down and cost you money. However, integration requires more than simply moving data around and patching holes in your integration protocols. As you’ve heard before, you need to move the whole system to the next level.
Data integration helps address some of these challenges by providing a single view of customers and enabling real-time collaboration between teams. Many companies like HubSpot, Salesforce, and Microsoft use data integration tools to help bring together disparate data sources. You can collect and manage customer data across CRM, marketing automation, email, ERP, social media, even third-party e-commerce systems. And if you work with other teams in your company, data integration can help them access and collaborate with the data they need, so they can make better decisions.
New marketing strategies and processes are changing every day, and your company should be there to adapt. The biggest challenge when you are a small company is finding the right people and resources to get you where you want to be.
How do you envision scaling your company’s operations and offerings in the future?
The primary advantage of working in the marketing automation industry is keeping in touch with the latest tech advancements. Our marketing and sales team is in ongoing contact with new apps, platforms, and systems that are moving the needle into the future. Ultimately, this helps us shape up SyncSpider into a leading tech instrument for any aspiring e-commerce venture.
One of the primary principles of SyncSpider is to bring the future instead of waiting for it. This means that our business development team needs to stay ahead of the curve by providing innovative solutions to our customers before the need arises. New integration partners, improved workflows, and more intuitive tasks are the core services that attract many new customers.
The long-term goal is to work closely with all our integration partners on strategic content marketing campaigns to inspire, educate, and prepare our users for a better future with marketing automation.
The fundamental principle of our partnership program is to unlock all marketing assets to our integration partners in order to release the key information to the right customers as quickly as possible. No customer should waste time doing repetitive tasks that slow down the growth of their e-commerce business. SyncSpider exists to accelerate your e-commerce journey!
Demonstrating Brilliance
- “Connecting our own ERP software using SyncSpider’s universal API was easy to complete in a short time. The support is always there if we need them, and now, we can connect any channel we might need. Great tool!” – Georg Horninger, Head of IT at MwRcCars
- “We can easily sync our products, prices, and stock from our local ERP software to our webshop. Goods and attributes are frequently changing, so a flexible solution was an obligation. SyncSpider gives us exactly that flexibility.” – Kurt Hortehuber, Author and Publisher at OUPS
- “Instead of adding products by-products to WooCommerce, we used SyncSpider’s powerful tools. The project was ready before the deadline.” – Patrizia Faschang, Founder of Webdots
About the Leader
The founder and CEO of SyncSpider are Norbert Strappler. Norbert has been in the e-commerce industry for almost 17 years. An ambitious entrepreneur at heart, he has launched several companies in the digital marketing realm. At the present time, he’s also the active founder of Monobunt and DragDropr.
Since a young age, Norbert has always been ecstatic about the future of eCommerce. His enthusiasm and passion for an online world without borders motivated him to launch Monobunt ‒ a pioneer and one of Austria’s most successful e-commerce agencies that build and launch plenty of webshops in a year.
Working with hundreds of e-commerce clients in a dozen years, Norbert and his team became masters at their craft. Apart from being involved in the daily operations of his agency, Norbert is a regular speaker and guest at e-commerce conferences, workshops, and forums. The dynamic nature of his profession led Norbert to establish and maintain long-lasting relationships with various entrepreneurs and visionaries in the eCommerce realm.
After collecting valuable feedback and analytics from e-commerce owners for dozens of years, Norbert founded SyncSpider GmbH in 2016. After two years of development and initial feedback, SyncSpider went live for the first time in 2018 as the first universal E-commerce middleware.
Norbert’s long-lasting relationships in the e-commerce industry proved to be crucial for the formidable growth and shaping up the future of SyncSpider. The key elements for continuous growth and improvement were initial feedback, constructive ideas, and feature suggestions from new users, e-commerce experts, and well-established webshop founders.