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amycross
Product and Topic Expert
Product and Topic Expert
It’s happened to all of us. We’ve all shopped online and purchased something, only to be met with the frustration and disappointment of our order being out of stock or sold out. Not only does it cause a hassle getting a refund or waiting for the product we desire to be available, but it makes us want to find a better store to buy from, a store that shows when products are unavailable or out of stock in real time. Online stores that provide us with this type of visibility into the products we want will always keep us coming back for more. In the age of information, isn’t it important for information to be readily available, especially for products and goods we may wish to purchase?

74% of customers will switch brands if the purchasing process is too difficult, while 32% of customers will “break up” with a favorite brand after a single poor customer experience.1

Today there are more shoppers online than ever, and these shoppers expect more from their digital stores. Online shoppers expect to have visibility into stock and availability of products in real time and will often be put off by online stores that don’t offer these capabilities. Today many point-of-sale (POS) systems have moved to the cloud to unlock interconnected, real-time transaction processing at scale. This movement is driven by the need to have interconnected systems that provide customers with real- time access to a store’s inventory levels, creating a better consumer experience and increasing customer confidence and loyalty.

Over 2 billion consumers around the world shop online today.2

Challenges commonly faced in implementing real-time transaction processing

Although your customer base may expect real-time visibility into inventory and stock, implementing those solutions can be challenging. Not only do your cloud applications need efficient integrations for inventory, order fulfillment, and customer management demands, but your systems need to be able to handle large volumes of traffic and sales spikes. When key business events happen, your applications need to communicate with one another and take action to help ensure that transactions are being processed correctly. Automating business processes is another major challenge you may face when trying to implement real-time transaction processing at scale. Knowing when and where to automate processes can lead to efficiencies and increased customer satisfaction, but planning and deploying automation in a massive IT landscape can be daunting. Managing inventory and supply chains across multiple channels also poses some significant barriers and is often done manually without the right tools, causing inefficiencies and delaying customers in getting views into the correct levels of inventory. Lastly, a major pain point you may be facing is how to mitigate risk of losses due to cyberattacks. With cyberattacks occurring more frequently, it’s harder than ever before to ensure there are no breaches across your IT deployment.

How SAP’s Integration offering can help

At SAP, we strive to help you understand and predict the needs of your customers, and with that in mind, we continue to evolve our integration platform as a service (iPaaS), SAP Integration Suite. With SAP Integration Suite, we offer a plethora of capabilities to support your e-commerce platform. Let’s take a look at the services and capabilities within SAP Integration Suite and how they can help you.

Cloud Integration

With Cloud Integration, you can leverage over 2,500 pre-built integrations to help connect your IT landscape with ease. You can connect your SAP systems to any third-party applications to leverage the power of the cloud to connect systems everywhere at scale.

Open Connectors

With Open Connectors, you can simplify connectivity to more than 170 third-party applications and solutions for collaboration, messaging, customer relationship management (CRM), help desk, and other application types. With our pre-built connectors, you can take advantage of open data format to help ensure your transactions are processing in real-time, regardless of underlying third-party service architecture.

API Management

With API Management, you can build your own unique APIs based on open-source standards to help your systems communicate. You can also protect your APIs from security threats, manage traffic, and cache your data on the edge with more than 40 built-in policies.

Event Mesh

Event Mesh allows your applications to communicate asynchronously in real time across distributed landscapes. You can adopt scalable, event-driven process integration patterns and support peak loads across any environment to handle high volumes of business transactions.

Integration Advisor

With Integration Advisor, you can take advantage of powerful AI and machine learning tools to help you simplify the creation of message mapping. This helps you build the best messaging system possible to ensure your systems communicate flawlessly and in real time.

Trading Partner Management

Trading Partner Management allows you to communicate with your partners across your supply chain to get the real-time data you need for your customers.

Integration Assessment

Finally, Integration Assessment can help you strategize and streamline the integration of your systems with a systematic approach. By leveraging this feature, you can ensure that integrations now and in the future are standardized and help grow your business.

Build better, more connected digital stores with SAP Integration Suite

If you would like to learn more about SAP Integration Suite capabilities and how we can help your business, please explore these resources:

Interested in learning more? Check out these resources:


1 Deyan Georgiev, “55 Customer Experience Statistics You Need to Know in 2022,” Review42, March 7, 2022.

2 Daniela Coppola, “Digital Buyers Worldwide 2021,” Statista, October 13, 2021.