Reading Your Customers Like a Book with Ecommerce CRM Integration

Those operating a physical store have the benefit of seeing their customers. Abandoned carts are obvious, customer attitudes are right in front of you, and relationship management is more straightforward. When you own an online business, you’re left with a ton of guesswork — unless you have an ecommerce CRM.

A customer relationship management (CRM) tool acts as your all-in-one customer profile. A single source of truth. More than that, it enables a true omnichannel experience, more effective and targeted marketing efforts, and fine-tuned sales pipeline management.

Before you dive in and start using an ecommerce CRM to master customer segmentation and automate workflows, it’s important to know what these tools are and what they can do.

What is an ecommerce CRM?

When you’re running an ecommerce business, your customer base can be diverse, distributed, and downright unpredictable. Similar to a traditional CRM, an ecommerce CRM houses your customer information in one location, regardless of their preferred devices or location.

While a traditional CRM can work to some degree with an ecommerce business, an ecommerce CRM is built specifically for this arena. Typically, the right ecommerce CRM will more easily integrate with your ecommerce website, payment systems, and so on.

Key features of an ecommerce CRM.

While every ecommerce CRM is different, there are a number of key features you should look for when shopping around. Most ecommerce CRM offerings will feature:

• Automation tools: CRM tools can include automations that send notifications to specific customer segments during sales, if carts are abandoned, and so on. Bonus points if this automation is AI-powered and capable of more nuanced personalization.

• Customizable workflows: Speaking of automation, a CRM should have customizable workflows and rulesets you can put in place to trigger automated events.

• Sales pipeline management: Depending on your business and the sales cycle you may not need in-depth pipeline management. But, a CRM should still be capable of tracking where leads are in the funnel.

• Purchase history: An ecommerce CRM should track purchasing habits, from dates to quantities to overall spending.

• Comprehensive integration: Thorough ecommerce CRM integration is crucial. The right CRM should integrate with your entire ecommerce experience, from website to payment platform to marketing tools, enabling an omnichannel approach and more effective marketing.

• Scalability: An ecommerce CRM needs scalability, growing with your business as needed, supporting more users on your end and more customer data.

Last but certainly not least, any worthwhile ecommerce CRM needs to be intuitive. Ease of use will make it easier for you to get started and streamline onboarding if and when you need to introduce other employees to the platform.

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Benefits of CRM integration in ecommerce

Proper CRM integration can bring a number of benefits to your ecommerce store, beyond acting as a turbocharged form of contact management. (This is a big perk, though.)

Personalize marketing and promotion efforts.

Your ecommerce customers can be accessing your site from anywhere, anytime. On top of this, a customer journey might have a number of touchpoints, from first seeing your brand in a social media ad to Googling a product to then landing on your site. This can make your marketing strategy feel more like throwing things at a wall to see what sticks.

CRM systems, like Salesforce or Zoho CRM, compile your customer information and journey into one package. From there, you can use these tools to run marketing campaigns based on customer behavior, regardless of how many touchpoints there were.

For example, say you have a customer segment that hangs out on Instagram and loves baking. With the data from your CRM, you could:

1. Launch an Instagram ad campaign targeting this segment and run a concurrent sale.

2. Personalize the messaging of the ads to appeal to the customer segment as best as possible.

3. Use your CRM automation to notify top spenders in this segment of the sale via email marketing efforts.

The only limiting factor is your imagination. You can use ecommerce CRM to fine-tune product recommendations via email blasts, market to those who have abandoned carts, and so on.

Improve sales performance.

Whether you have a sales team or rely largely on inbound traffic, ecommerce CRM integration can make a big impact here, too.

• Customizable analytics dashboards empower you and/or your sales team to take the right actions at the right stage of the sales process.

• Detailed metrics make it possible to hone messaging and your sales approach, personalizing it to fit the customer.

• Conversion rate tracking via CRM can help you focus on poorer performing segments, opening the door to A/B testing different messaging and marketing approaches.

• Automated data collection saves you and your sales people the time of manual lead management, allowing you to focus on conversions.

• In-depth information on cart abandonment and lost opportunities makes it possible to improve weak points in your sales funnel.

On top of this, many ecommerce CRM platforms will have file-sharing tools and the like, making it easy to update and swap email templates. This enables a more personal approach to emailing new or existing leads, while still saving your team valuable time.

Foster collaboration.

A CRM gives every employee a singular view of the customer, tearing down data silos. This makes it easier for everyone to collaborate, as everyone is operating with the same info and on the same page.

With a universal source of truth, your marketing and sales teams can operate with the same data, share insights gleaned from experience, and work hand-in-hand to deliver the most effective marketing and sales funnel possible.

On top of this, you can use inventory turnover data to launch marketing efforts that focus on slower-moving products.

Improve the customer experience.

An ecommerce CRM compiles customer interactions and information from all locations, making it possible for you to optimize the customer experience across email, mobile, SMS, social media, and more. This is especially important as more and more ecommerce businesses focus on delivering an omnichannel experience.

With this holistic customer profile, you have an unprecedented opportunity to optimize the customer experience. For example, if a customer has a question about a product they’re interested in, you can quickly see what they’ve ordered in the past and lean in on the appropriate selling points.

Better inventory planning and forecasting.

With the inventory and sales data housed in your CRM, you can quickly identify buying patterns across customer segments and determine if certain products are seasonal. From there, you can:

• Adjust inventory as needed, ordering more or less of an item.

• Make tweaks to pricing or marketing efforts if a product is historically underselling.

• Order popular products when their prices are lower.

Inventory management is a bit of a balancing act. You don’t want a warehouse full of goods collecting dust, but you also don’t want items out of stock when they’re needed most. With an ecommerce CRM and the right inventory management strategy, you can find exactly the right balance.

Limits losses and costs.

With the customer journey insights offered by a CRM tool, you can improve your chances of recovering a lost lead. For instance, if someone initiates a chat on your site and leaves, you can then pull this info from the CRM and send an email follow-up.

An ecommerce CRM also makes it easier to prevent future losses. If open rates are low, you can test subject lines. If product pages have high bounce rates, you can tweak the interface and messaging. If carts are frequently abandoned, you can work on streamlining the checkout experience.

Not-so-fun fact: 18% of cart abandonment comes from an overcomplicated checkout process.

Stay competitive.

As of 2025, 67.9% of companies use CRM platforms. This number increases as the size of the company does, meaning the bigger players in your niche are more likely to have a CRM in place.

It should be clear by now that, across the board, a CRM can help you stay competitive. It will help you market more effectively, determine if your checkout is user-friendly, monitor inventory, and make more informed decisions within almost every facet of your business.

Simply put: A CRM is a must if you want to stay competitive in this day and age.

Strengthen your email marketing.

While a CRM system will help your marketing efforts in general, it’s especially helpful with email marketing, enabling you to:

• Reach out to those who left bad reviews and remedy the situation.

• Run email campaigns promoting products bad on historical and forecasted data.

• Email those who abandoned their cart and send a discount code.

• Run mini email campaigns based on customer segmentation data, targeting underperforming audiences.

Keep in mind, much of the above info also applies to other forms of digital marketing, too.

Adjust your strategy on the fly.

Between a complete customer profile based on historical data and real-time analytics, you can make minor or major adjustments to your business and marketing strategies on the fly.

Product pages underperforming? Run A/B tests and pivot as needed. Cart abandonment on the rise? Adjust your checkout process. Realize a certain product isn’t performing as expected? Try lowering the price or changing your messaging.

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Drawbacks to CRM integration

Nothing is perfect, and that includes ecommerce CRM integration.

Getting the most out of your ecommerce CRM requires effort on your end, and does bring a handful of risks with it.

As the old adage goes, “knowledge is power.” Be aware of the following and you can reduce the risks.

Can minimize the human element.

While the main goal of a customer relationship management tool is to provide a personalized customer experience, it also reduces each customer to a data point. On top of this, the inferences made from data, while statistically accurate, may not always translate to the real world.

For example, AI-powered automation may make what’s known as “spurious correlations”— a connection between two variables that appears to be causal but isn’t.

Always review recommendations made by your CRM tool, checking whether they’re suitable for your business and audience.

Furthermore, don’t forget that at the end of the day, all that data in your CRM represents real people with real lives.

Raises some security concerns.

Anytime you’re handling any kind of data integration there are cybersecurity risks. While many CRM tools are cloud-based, taking some of the security burden off your plate, cloud-based platforms also have their own vulnerabilities.

You can minimize these risks by:

• Choosing a CRM that’s ISO 27001 certified.

• Checking the cybersecurity track record of any potential CRM.

• Following best practices in-house, like using multi-factor authentication (MFA).

• Limiting CRM access to certified, trusted users in your business.

You can’t control whether a CRM provider has a breach on their end, but you can control what happens in your own organization. The best first line of defense is properly training your staff and securing your own ecommerce site from cybersecurity threats.

Requires employee training.

Any ecommerce CRM will require some degree of employee training. This can either be a time investment on your end, or a financial investment if you hire someone to train your staff.

No matter the route you take, make sure you train your team on how to use your CRM for your specific use cases. Don’t stress over training them on every functionality of the CRM, as this will overwhelm even the most seasoned software gurus.

For those who need more specific training, like digging into order management or marketing automation, ensure they get the appropriate training.

Keep in mind many CRM solutions will offer training as part of their customer support!

Popular ecommerce CRM tools used today

There are countless ecommerce CRM tools available. What works for another company may not suit your uses. To help you narrow your search, we’ve compiled a list of the most popular ecommerce CRM tools used by ecommerce stores just like yours.

HubSpot.

Hubspot is a powerful CRM with especially robust marketing features, and a BigCommerce integration to boot. Some of our favorite Hubspot features include:

• AI-powered marketing automation that can help brainstorm campaign ideas, suggest campaigns based on goals, and take the busywork out of email marketing setup.

• A visual builder that makes it easy to ideate collateral, build emails and landing pages, and design blog posts.

• Intuitive chatbot software, enabling quick setup of your store’s own virtual assistant.

Hubspot is a well-known name in the space for a reason. Hubspot is especially great for those just starting out, as the host of marketing and SEO tools can help you compete with larger teams while operating as a small, scrappy startup.

Salesforce.

Salesforce is another big name in the CRM industry, with an emphasis on enterprise-level customer management.

Large ecommerce stores and those looking to scale can benefit from:

• AI-powered autonomous agents that field customer concerns and questions, direct orders, and ultimately serve as additional members to your team.

• A drag-and-drop app builder that requires no coding knowledge.

• The ability to develop customized training, making it easier to onboard and train new hires on CRM features that fit your specific use cases.

BigCommerce is proud to offer a Salesforce integration, making it easy to bring Salesforce into your ecommerce business and benefit from the above and more in no time.

Klaviyo.

While Hubspot and Salesforce can fit a number of CRM uses, Klaviyo is a standout in that it’s built for business-to-consumer (B2C) ecommerce.

Klaviyo isn’t as feature rich as Hubspot or Salesforce, but leans in on automation and AI, offering:

• Natural language-based customer segmentation, making it easy to pinpoint audiences.

• AI-powered email send support that suggests ideal send times based on historical trends.

• Real-time customer profiles that update within 200ms of a customer action.

For smaller ecommerce businesses looking to nail their segmentation, Klaviyo is a great choice with an equally great BigCommerce integration.

Zoho.

Zoho is a unique offering, with a CRM that’s only a part of the company’s vast offerings. With Zoho, ecommerce businesses get access to:

• Support for highly complex workflows and customizable customer profiles, including sub-forms that capture niche customer info.

• Data-rich reporting that can be tailored to include a vast amount of information, with lighter, more visual dashboards for those who want a high-level view.

• A powerful AI that can help with sales predictions, workflow suggestions, lead nurturing, and more.

Many note that Zoho has a steeper learning curve than other offerings, like Hubspot. But, for those wanting a high degree of customization, Zoho is a popular choice.

ActiveCampaign.

ActiveCampaign isn’t the Swiss army knife that some of the previous options are, but is a cost-effective solution for those interested in:

• Comprehensive reporting that includes geolocation information, page visits, purchase history, and more.

• Marketing-centric automation that’s capable of automating email, SMS, product sales, and more.

• A library of AI use cases that takes the guesswork out of prompts and determining where to start with automation.

ActiveCampaign benefits from a manageable monthly subscription fee as well, thanks in part to having more feature-rich CRM functionality as an optional add-on package. This makes it especially appealing to smaller or resource-limited ecommerce businesses.

Pipedrive.

Pipedrive has a number of features, but sets itself apart with its broad sales pipeline focus. With Pipedrive, you can truly hone in on your sales efforts with:

• A sales pipeline visualizer that highlights key activities for boosting performance, and enables you to add goals for your sales team.

• An intuitive sales dashboard that highlights deals completed, top performers, best accounts, and offers suggestions on how to regain lost leads.

• Automation that pairs with your sales funnel makes it easy to trigger certain events during the sales cycle, set custom sales funnels for different teams or products, and more.

The sales pipeline features of Pipedrive can benefit just about any ecommerce business, but are especially enticing for those with longer or more complex sales cycles, high-value products, or large sales teams.

The final word

The larger customer pool available to online retailers feel like a blessing and a curse. But with a powerful ecommerce CRM at your side, it can work in your favor.

No single CRM software is perfect, nor is any CRM right for every ecommerce business. Ultimately, your use cases and whether a CRM integrates with your ecommerce platform are two of the biggest deciding factors.

With BigCommerce, you get access to a powerful ecommerce platform and everything that comes with it. (A drag-and-drop site builder, low/no code development, and support for a variety of payments, to name a few.)

Moreover, BigCommerce has native support for most major CRM platforms, making it easy to launch your ecommerce business and start managing customer relations no matter how big or spread out your audience gets.

Trying to understand the customers of your online store CAN feel like a lot of guesswork. Sign up for a demo of BigCommerce and see how we bring clarity to the ecommerce world.

FAQs for ecommerce CRM integration