Reviewed by Mayer Hyman, Payments Specialist | Reviewed for accuracy July 2026
Key Takeaways
- An ERP gives a growing ecommerce or retail business a single, connected view of sales, inventory, accounts, and fulfillment instead of a patchwork of point solutions.
- Modern ERPs are cloud-delivered (SaaS), which lowers up-front cost and lets a business turn on new functionality without a lengthy IT project.
- Chargebacks are one of the more expensive gaps in most ERPs: a single dispute can cost up to 3.4 times the original transaction value once fees, labor, and lost processing volume are counted (Mastercard, 2025).
- Pairing an ERP with dedicated chargeback and payment integration tools closes that gap without forcing a business to manage disputes manually in spreadsheets or accounting software.
Why Growing Ecommerce Businesses Outgrow Point Solutions
Adopting an ERP sooner rather than later saves substantial time and creates efficiencies as a business grows, replacing the patchwork of point solutions — one tool for inventory, another for accounting, another for shipping — that most smaller ecommerce firms start with. That patchwork approach works at a small scale, but it doesn’t scale with the business, and ecommerce-based firms, or those transitioning from traditional retail to online, have a wide array of tools and services at their disposal to drive the business forward instead.
Business is chaos, especially in the fast-moving world of online retail. Once it becomes clear that an ERP is valuable for small companies as well as large ones, retail-focused firms can build a singular view of their company instead of stitching together disconnected systems after the fact.
Why SaaS-Delivered ERP Fits Growing Retailers
Delivered as SaaS, resource management underpins the growth of any business. SaaS empowers new businesses with faster time to market, lower up-front costs, and no on-premise maintenance burden.
A regular upgrade cadence also means the latest features suited to ecommerce and retail are delivered on an ongoing basis rather than through disruptive, infrequent overhauls. Infor, for example, has rolled artificial intelligence into its suite through Infor’s ColemanAI, aimed at boosting customer satisfaction, increasing revenue, and optimizing vendor selection.
ERPs help manage multiple business processes at once: accounts, materials, production, sales, and payroll. By providing an interlinked view of those processes alongside growth and strategy, it becomes easier to plan sales and marketing efforts with real data instead of guesswork.
Once a business grows beyond a handful of employees, having that singular view of operations, cash, and processes becomes essential. Modern ERPs are typically cloud-enabled to provide an instant-on service, and are configurable to the needs of most verticals or business types, delivering the features a company needs today and the flexibility to add more tomorrow.
Let ERP Manage the Business So You Can Focus on Selling
With an ERP in place, taking Infor’s CloudSuite as an example, a business can integrate its ecommerce platform, such as Shopify, using Infor Rhythm for Commerce or an eCommerce Connector, for that holistic overview of the business. CloudSuite also integrates with Amazon AWS to support a host of business, commerce, and retail solutions, enabling firms to buy, deploy, and run tools that transform operations in hours rather than weeks or months.
CloudSuite supports traditional retailers with demand planning and logistics, and ecommerce brands with customer engagement, product information management, personalized shopping experiences, and other features that add value and performance.
All of that integrates across the business, so a team can identify sales opportunities and keep an up-to-the-minute view of revenue and profit. Where most ERPs fall short, however, is in handling ecommerce-specific finance tasks like chargebacks.
Adding Chargeback and Payment Integration to Your ERP
Chargeback management is one of the more expensive blind spots in a typical ERP deployment, and the numbers make the case for closing it. A single chargeback can cost a merchant up to 3.4 times the original transaction value once network fees, staff time, and the downstream impact on processing relationships are counted, according to Mastercard’s 2025 analysis. Fraud losses tell a similar story: US merchants now lose $4.61 for every $1 of fraud once transaction value, fees, and operational costs are included (LexisNexis True Cost of Fraud Study, 2025).
Chargeback and payment integration features, like those offered by Cartis, are built to close that gap in the high-volume ecommerce world, helping businesses reduce costs, increase operational efficiency, and keep customers and banks satisfied while protecting profitability.
Fast-growing firms can go from a modest starting point to tens of millions of dollars in revenue across millions of transactions in a short span. Processing chargebacks manually, using general accounting tools not built for dispute management, quickly becomes unsustainable and costly at that volume.
Getting ahead of the growth curve with an ERP that can handle chargebacks natively, or that connects cleanly to a dedicated chargeback and payments layer, avoids the problem of underpowered systems that can’t scale. It also improves the level of automation, freeing leaders and teams to focus on core operational issues instead of manual dispute handling.
Choosing the Right Combination of ERP and Payment Tools
Whatever the business ambition, understanding the benefits of SaaS, ERP, and integrating modern chargeback and payment tools is key to running the online sales side at maximum efficiency. That holds whether a business is dropshipping or expanding a boutique retail operation to offer more products.
For businesses aiming to compete with larger marketplaces, managing every dollar and every hour of operational time is vital to delivering an efficient service and maximizing revenue. An ERP paired with dedicated chargeback and payment integration tools, such as those from Cartis Payments’ payment integration, gives growing ecommerce and retail businesses the finishing piece their operations often lack.
FAQ
Does a small ecommerce business really need an ERP, or is that overkill?
An ERP becomes worthwhile once a business is managing multiple point solutions for inventory, accounting, and fulfillment separately. Cloud-delivered ERPs have lowered the up-front cost and complexity enough that even small, fast-growing retailers can benefit from a single connected view of the business.
Why don’t most ERPs handle chargebacks well?
ERPs are generally built for accounting, inventory, and operations, not for the dispute workflows that payment networks require. That gap means many businesses end up processing chargebacks manually or bolting on a separate tool, which gets expensive fast at high transaction volume.
What does a chargeback actually cost beyond the disputed amount?
A single chargeback can cost up to 3.4 times the original transaction value once network fees, staff time spent contesting disputes, and the effect on processing relationships are included, according to Mastercard’s 2025 analysis.
