Software integration

Software integration is the process of getting two applications to talk to each other and share data to achieve an end goal. An example of integration is paying for goods on your favourite shopping site using a payment service such as PayPal or Klarna - there are exchanges of data between the shopping site and the payment provider to complete the transaction.

There are a huge number of services available that can be used to enhance your site via software integration and this can provide lots of benefits:

• Adding trusted services, for example around payments, can increase your customer’s confidence in your site or service
• You can expand the services and functionality available on your site relatively quickly  - faster and cheaper than developing the same functionality in-house
• Integrating with the right service can open up functionality and features you may not realise you needed - giving you new opportunities to improve your service
• Integrating with services that can handle large amounts of data (sales and customer data for example) can take away the headache of having to manage the secure storage and backup of this data yourself
• Integration can also help you automate repetitive tasks and reduce your daily workload
• The recent growth of AI-related services is also opening up exciting new possibilities for integration