What are website integrations?

Integrations allow your website to connect with other websites and tools automatically, eliminating the need to update and manage it manually. Integrations help small business owners save time and effort.

Instead of dealing with various systems that don’t connect, integrations provide a seamless connection between systems and facilitate the flow of a booking, payment, and customer data.

Common types of integration

There are some types of integrations that small businesses work with the most:

Booking Systems – Calendly and Acuity have booking systems that book appointments automatically and sync with the small business owner’s calendar

Payment Processors – Stripe, PayPal, and Woo Commerce are examples of services that help small business owners accept payments safely for a one time purchase or subscription payment

Customer Relationship Management (CRM) and Email Tools – As the name suggests, platforms like HubSpot and MailChimp helps small business owners manage customer relationships and send emails, and automatically sign-up customers from a business’ website.

Why integrations matter

Automation dramatically reduces the time it takes to move the same data from one system to the other. Without integration, you would have to manually check your booking calendar, move your appointments to your work calendar, and add customer email contacts to your mailing list.

For repetitive work that involves moving data, it is worth it to integrate.

What to keep in mind as you’re thinking of integrations

Integration for integrations sake is convenient, but we have some considerations for you:

• Cost – Integrations add to the ongoing costs of your site, so verify the costs involved
• Reliability – Not all third party integrations are made equal. Well supported integrations are more reliable
• GDPR – If an integration involves customer data storage, make sure you are maintaining UK data protection standards

If there are any of the above considerations you would like us to expand on before we set up an integration for your site, just let us know so we can have a detailed discussion about the implications.

How Sunneo sets integrations up

We make sure to connect your site to your booking systems, payment gateways, and your CRM and marketing automation systems.

We talk you through all the costs and the data protection implications of the systems you chose, so you aren’t surprised by anything but the setup.

Starting with what matters most

It’s always fun to think of all the ways your site can integrate with other services, but we’d actually encourage you to focus on the integrations you would use the most to help streamline your processes now.contact us. We look forward to the opportunity to assist you.