Your store rarely lives alone. Orders need to reach accounting, shipments need labels, and customers need to land in your marketing tools.
Map the data before the tools
Write down what moves where: orders, inventory, customers, shipping status, refunds. Note which system is the source of truth for each, so two systems never both believe they own the same record.
Start with the step that costs you the most time
Look for the manual task someone repeats every day, such as re-keying orders into accounting, and automate that first. A small win builds confidence and shows the shape of the next project.
Prefer integrations you can inspect
- Can you see the messages that were sent, and the ones that failed?
- Can you change the field mapping without waiting for a vendor?
- Is there an API for the case nobody planned for?
Keep a short list of what is connected
A one-page list of every integration, who owns it and what happens when it fails saves hours the first time something breaks at a bad moment.