Order Management Archives | Suvae.org Wed, 30 Oct 2024 09:42:43 +0000 en-GB hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=6.6.2 https://Suvae.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/highstreet-io-site-icon-512.png Order Management Archives | Suvae.org 32 32 Amazon FBA vs FBM: How Brands Should Decide https://Suvae.org/amazon-fba-inventory-management/ Tue, 29 Oct 2024 07:00:02 +0000 https://Suvae.org/?p=15687 With Amazon’s ever-expanding global network encompassing over 175 fulfillment centers, the capabilities and advantages of its Fulfilled By Amazon (FBA) platform continue to grow. That doesn’t mean Amazon FBA is right for every brand, or in all circumstances. As you expand your eCommerce capabilities, the Amazon FBA vs. FBM debate can become difficult to resolve. […]

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With Amazon’s ever-expanding global network encompassing over 175 fulfillment centers, the capabilities and advantages of its Fulfilled By Amazon (FBA) platform continue to grow.

That doesn’t mean Amazon FBA is right for every brand, or in all circumstances. As you expand your eCommerce capabilities, the Amazon FBA vs. FBM debate can become difficult to resolve.

This post will help by walking you through the details of both options, along with some tips on inventory management and additional automation opportunities you should consider.

What is Amazon FBA Inventory Management?

Amazon FBA (Fulfillment by Amazon) Inventory Management is a system that allows your business to organize, track, and optimize your store product inventory in their fulfillment centers.

The platform handles critical inventory and order management tasks like:

  • monitoring stock levels
  • forecasting product demand
  • replenishing inventory
  • fulfilling orders
  • handling returns

How Amazon FBA Inventory Management Works

When a customer places an order, Amazon handles the picking, packing, shipping, and customer service, providing sellers with a streamlined and efficient way to fulfill orders and reach a broader customer base.

Amazon FBA Setup Steps:

Setting up an Amazon FBA account is the first step to leveraging the platform’s fulfillment capabilities. Follow these simple steps and benefit from streamlined order fulfillment, access to Prime customers, and the means for providing excellent customer service.

Step 1: FBA Setup 

Create your Amazon selling account and log in to Seller Central to set up FBA.

Step 2: List Your Products 

Add your products to the Amazon catalog and indicate them as FBA inventory.

Step 3: Product Preparation 

Follow Amazon’s packing guidelines and shipping requirements to ensure your products are prepared safely and securely for transportation to a fulfillment center.

Step 4: Send to Amazon 

Create a shipping plan, print Amazon shipment ID labels, and send your shipments to designated Amazon fulfillment centers.

What is Amazon FBM?

Amazon FBA isn’t the only way to manage the process of getting online orders shipped to consumers. The company also offers Amazon Fulfillment by Merchant (FBM), where sellers either manages or works with a third party to handle areas such as inventory placement, storage, shipping, processing returns and customer service issues.

Key Differences Between Amazon FBA and FBM

Evaluating Amazon FBA vs. FBM requires thinking across a range of business factors, some of which will be more important than others depending on the size of your company, typical order volumes and your strategic goals.

Startup Costs and Fees

Be prepared for a wide range of fees when you get started with Amazon FBA. These not only include per-unit fees but monthly charges for storing inventory, return fees for some product categories, package prep fees and more. In contrast, Amazon FBM only involves paying an annual subscription fee.

On the flip side, fulfilling your own orders means you’ll have to have your own warehouse (or work with a partner with more cost-effective services than Amazon’s) and other in-house resources for picking, packing and shipping your products.

Control Over Shipping and Customer Interaction

Amazon FBA is akin to many traditional outsourcing services, which free up the companies that use them to concentrate on areas like developing better products, marketing and nurturing customer relationships.

In some cases, though, staying close to customer needs and expectations can become harder when you fulfill orders through intermediaries, which is where Amazon FBM might be the better approach. Amazon FBM also means you’re not affected by sudden changes in fulfillment policies and support options that Amazon makes occasionally.

Inventory Management and Logistics

Unless you already have a background or experience in order fulfillment, option for Amazon FBM will require extensive learning and development across your company. This isn’t as big of an issue for companies when they first launch, but the complexity can increase as your volume of orders goes up. Of course, handing off everything through Amazon FBA means you’ll never master these areas, either.

Scalability and Growth Potential

Most brands want to continually add more customers, increase revenue and expand into international markets. Taking the Amazon FBA approach allows you to scale and grow without worrying about the impact on order fulfillment. If you decide to go the Amazon FBM route instead, you’ll just have to develop a business plan that takes into account the potential need for more warehouses, staff and other resources.

Pros and Cons of Amazon FBA

There’s a lot to be said for using Amazon FBA, but also a few tradeoffs:

Pro: Stress-free shipping

The process of picking, packing and transporting products from a warehouse to a customer’s doorstep can be highly complex, time-consuming and expense. Amazon FBA provides an option to completely outsource this area so brands can focus their attention entirely on marketing, selling and developing their products.

Con: Higher expenses

Selling your own products can require significant capital expense. Using Amazon FBA means you’ll be responsible for a range of storage and fulfillment fees, as well as the costs of sitting on inventory if sales don’t reach expected levels.

Pro: Prime shipping

There’s a reason Amazon has managed to develop one of the most popular loyalty programs of all time. Free shipping for Prime members can make all the difference with customers who aren’t sure whether to go through with a purchase. Using Amazon FBA means your products can offer Prime shipping too, offering an immediate competitive advantage over brands that aren’t.

Con: Policy compliance

Selling with Amazon FBA means agreeing you’ll adhere to all its guidelines. These include the way products are added to its database, packaging and other specifications. It can take time to learn Amazon FBA policies and ensure you’re maintaining compliance on an ongoing basis.

Pro: Post-purchase journey management

Customers will remember (and reward) brands that help them with customer service issues and process returns without a hassle. Brands that use Amazon FBA effectively outsource their customer service operation, and the company has a proven track record in bringing efficiency to product returns.

Con: Inventory fluctuations

The flip side of Amazon’s best-in-class returns process is that customers may send more of your products back than expected, in some cases buying multiple versions or styles to try them first. Having Amazon serve as a fulfillment partner can also make it difficult to maintain full visibility into what you have in stock.

Pros and Cons of Amazon FBM

Similarly, companies thinking about Amazon FBM should weigh the following risks and rewards:

Pro: Increased profit

If you’re a brand selling high-value products (like luxury fashion and accessories) with relatively low order volumes, using Amazon FBM could potentially mean a wider profit margin than outsourcing your fulfillment processes.

Con: Greater resource investment

Even a profitable company will have to ensure they offset the absence of Amazon resources to help manage order fulfillment, returns and related tasks. The amount of warehouse space you’ll need to store products can also vary widely during periods like the holiday season, which makes planning how much time, effort and equipment you’ll be investing in these areas even more difficult.

Pro: Flexibility for personalized experiences

When you choose Amazon FBM you retain full control over how your products are packaged, which could allow you to personalize orders for your most valuable customers. You’ll also be able to make judgment calls on whether to waive fees or other policies when a loyal customer needs to process a return.

Con: The lack of Prime status

In most cases products fulfilled via Amazon FBM are not eligible for Prime. This cuts your brand out from a large number of established Amazon customers who regularly make purchases in order to justify their monthly membership fees.

Pro: More opportunities to gather and analyze data

Managing fulfillment on your own could help deepen insights in customer shopping patterns, distribution channel preferences and more. This opens the door to creating customer segments and a more tailored approach to marketing and selling your products.

Con: Greater risk of negative outcomes

If orders arrive slowly, late or the wrong product is delivered, you’ll only have your own fulfillment operation to blame. However those mistakes can add up, having an adverse affect on areas such as customer retention and customer lifetime value.

How the Amazon FBA vs. FBM Decision Can Affect Your Multichannel eCommerce

Many brands are not only selling their products on their own websites and online marketplaces like Amazon but via additional eCommerce channels. These channels can be highly proprietary and a lack of integration can cause problems in taking and fulfilling orders. If your company has reached this level of complexity, Amazon FBA might be the desired option due to factors such as:

Managing Inventory Across Multiple Channels

Amazon FBA includes Multi Channel Fulfillment (MCF) services, whereby sellers can use API plug-ins to connect popular eCommerce channels such as WooCommerce and Magento. Amazon also offers multi-channel listing software so you can making listings from a single location.

If you go with Amazon FBM, you’ll have to address this on your own or with a trusted third party with experience in multichannel eCommerce integration and product listing.

Ensuring Fast Shipping and Quality Control

Regardless of the Amazon FBA vs. FBM question, all customers will want the same thing: to have the right product arrive in a timely manner without any damage or other quality control issues.

Beyond speed of order fulfillment, some of the most common quality control problems stem from a lack of poor inventory management. Here’s how to address them:

  • Stockouts: Inadequate inventory management can sometimes lead to frequent stockouts, where your products become unavailable for purchase. This results in missed sales opportunities, dissatisfied customers, and potential damage to your seller’s reputation.> Amazon’s re-stock guide helps to keep your stock up-to-date.
  • Overstocking: Poor inventory management may lead to overstocking, where you hold excessive inventory that ties up capital and storage space. Overstocking can increase storage fees, inventory obsolescence, and reduce profitability.>The Manage Excess Inventory page in your Seller Central FBA account helps you maintain the right inventory levels.
  • Inaccurate Order Fulfillment: Fulfilling customer orders is only possible with accurate inventory management. You could mistakenly accept orders for products that are no longer in stock, leading to cancellations, negative reviews, and customer dissatisfaction.>Amazon’s Inventory Management Dashboard is an excellent way to track your orders and inventory.
  • Inefficient Replenishment: The inability to accurately forecast customer demand and manage inventory numbers can result in inadequate replenishment. Sellers may experience delays in restocking.>Use a tool like Amazon’s re-stock guide to avoid these holdups.

How Suvae.org Can Help You to Simplify Product Inventory Management

The good news is that the right technology solutions can streamline and automate many core eCommerce processes, no matter how your Amazon FBA vs. Amazon FBM comparison turns out. When brands work with Suvae.org, for instance, they gain access to capabilities such as:

Multichannel optimization solutions to ensure seamless order fulfillment

Suvae.org turns product data optimization and product feed development into a managed service. This means you can connect with popular eCommerce channels with ease and have full confidence in how orders are collected and processed for fulfillment.

Inventory management solutions for Amazon FBA sellers

The most successful eCommerce companies have a clear line of sight into what’s in stock and what’s not. Suvae.org’s platform acts like a hub between your products and key selling channels, allowing you to synchronize data between your product catalog and Amazon’s warehouses.

Integration with popular marketplaces like Amazon

Getting set up to sell on Amazon can take a lot of manual work, which increases the risk of errors. Suvae.org’s marketplace integration services handle everything from product listings to category mappings. In fact, Amazon is just one of more than 50 marketplaces where Suvae.org can help brands extend their reach.

Contact us today to schedule a demo and discover how Highstree.io can help you automate and centralize your marketplace workflow.

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Composable commerce vs headless: Which to use and why https://Suvae.org/composable-commerce-vs-headless/ Mon, 06 Nov 2023 15:32:59 +0000 https://Suvae.org/?p=16618 Every retailer renovates their stores occasionally, and they often go well beyond adding a fresh coat of paint. The layout of the aisles may get reconfigured for easier browsing. New displays and signage clarify where shoppers can find their favorite product categories. Point-of-sale systems get moved and self-checkout kiosks are set up to streamline purchasing. […]

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Every retailer renovates their stores occasionally, and they often go well beyond adding a fresh coat of paint.

The layout of the aisles may get reconfigured for easier browsing.

New displays and signage clarify where shoppers can find their favorite product categories.

Point-of-sale systems get moved and self-checkout kiosks are set up to streamline purchasing.

Even if they make major changes, though, brands are essentially working within the same three-dimensional space of four walls, a ceiling, and a floor.

An eCommerce renovation – even a minor one – is more complicated. That’s why the difference between composable commerce vs. headless approaches matters.

What is the difference between composable commerce vs. headless?

When brands set up their first eCommerce sites, they couldn’t have anticipated the way shoppers would not only browse on desktop PCs but also on their smartphones.

The same goes for social media platforms, which evolved from places to share content with friends and family to a showcase for all manner of fashion and luxury goods.

Who would have realized that brands could not only sell through their site but Amazon, Zalando, and even online marketplaces from the likes of Macy’s?

Every new digital channel that emerges represents a huge opportunity for brands. Think of each one as a new door that gets added to a physical store. In reality, however, adding those doors can prove daunting. Existing technology platforms can prove rigid or inflexible to integrate more channels.

If you’re weighing composable vs. headless options for the future of your eCommerce business, it’s probably because they each represent a more fluid and dynamic way to tackle these challenges. Here’s how to distinguish between the two:

Headless architecture

The design of an eCommerce site may vary largely among brands, but the underlying architecture is usually the same. There is a front end that customers see, usually based on a content management system (CMS) to display creative elements like images and text. There is also the back-end, which can handle everything from capturing and processing orders to feeding into a CRM and other systems.

The key characteristic of headless vs. composable commerce is that it essentially consists of decoupling or separating these two areas of functionality and using an API to facilitate communication from one to the other.

This allows the backend to continue running as it should while allowing brands to optimize the CMS to work with social media, wearables, and even VR/AR channels. It opens up the ability to create customer experiences based on particular personas, segments, or business models.

Composable commerce architecture

What sets composable commerce vs. headless, on the other hand, is an even greater ability to customize eCommerce experiences.

A composable commerce architecture uses microservices to treat functions as a series of modules.

When you migrate to composable commerce with the right partner solutions, for instance, it becomes far easier to orchestrate the connection between a brand’s product catalog, order management system, inventory management system, and ERP via that API.

Composable commerce architecture

Whether your business goal is to enhance ad retargeting, adopt a new social media service, or sell on an online marketplace, a composable commerce platform allows you to “compose” your tech stack without introducing performance or interoperability issues. Instead, those front-end customer touchpoints and back-end operations can be mixed and matched as required.

Just as fashionable consumers create a perfect ensemble by selecting the ideal top, shirt, shoes, and jewelry, a composable commerce architecture provides brands the freedom to curate the ideal tech stack.

What are composable commerce vs. headless pros and cons?

As you assess the potential headless and composable commerce benefits, keep in mind the following:

Headless architecture pros:

  • Faster time to deploying new eCommerce experiences such as smart mirrors and progressive web applications (PWAs)
  • More options in terms of the CMS used to adapt emerging digital channels
  • The ability to make changes to the CMS or backend without one negatively impacting the other.

Headless architecture cons:

  • Greater complexity and maintenance requirements based on potentially using more than one CMS
  • Greater costs to build eCommerce experiences specific to each digital channel
  • Platform limitations: Depending on your business needs there may not always be a large number of platforms that support headless commerce.
  • Potential API rate limits and GET request limits based on fetching multiple product catalogs to support multiple markets

Composable commerce architecture pros:

  • The greatest possible range of features and vendor integrations to build into an eCommerce experience
  • Increased scalability of new features and channels as your business grows
  • A utilization model based on business need, reducing the risk of over-investing in technology
  • Increased speed to modify or make changes by substituting or upgrading specific modules without a negative impact on other modules or core systems

Composable commerce architecture cons:

  • Potentially larger pool of vendor relationships to manage as additional microservices are added to the overall eCommerce experience
  • Greater onus on orchestrating microservices and modules without jeopardizing performance and security
  • Increased complexity in integrating with multiple online marketplaces in addition to a brand’s own eCommerce website.

Choosing between composable commerce vs. headless architecture

Resolving the debate over headless vs. composable commerce should begin, as with any critical business decision, by looking at your current and future customer needs.

Use existing data about customer behavior to indicate how their digital habits are changing, and whether providing the best possible experience will require adding more channels. Complement this with market research that helps validate the shifts in customer journeys you’ve perceived.

Next, consider the impact of your eCommerce evolution on your team. A composable commerce platform or headless CMS, for example, could provide greater uptime, faster upgrades, and more manageable growth. This is the thinking behind what is now known as MACH principles, where architecture is microservices-based, API-first, cloud-native, and headless.

Best practices in adopting either headless or composable commerce architecture

There is no uniform IT playbook that’s specific to composable commerce vs. headless architecture. In general, though, you’ll want to:

1. Plan based on reduced manual effort

Greater agility should not come at the expense of increased time and effort from internal resources. While a headless CMS and a composable commerce platform can bring a lot of efficiencies, there can still be considerable integration and orchestration work involved. Look for a trusted partner with the experience and solutions that will ease the transition and set you up for greater flexibility in the long term.

2. Expect a continued diversification of online shopping channels

With more consumers using their smartphones to shop than ever before, you’ll need an eCommerce platform able to support advanced sales and marketing tools such as Local Inventory Ads (LIAs). At the same time, more online marketplaces are being introduced every year to target specific geographies or niche interests. Determine how, if you migrate to composable commerce, you can keep ahead of these new needs and channels.

3. Keep your options open with APIs

Your preferred architectural approach will lead to a more bespoke strategy based on your data, your maturity in managing product catalogs, existing CMS, and many other details. What you can be sure of, however, is that the need to sync APIs transcends the headless vs. composable commerce debate.

Decoupling the front and back end of your eCommerce website and embracing APIs, for instance, could be a starting point to introducing greater composability throughout your tech stack.

4. Treat use cases as an opportunity to test and learn

Even if you have specific eCommerce outcomes you’re trying to achieve, you should migrate to composable commerce or headless commerce with care. It’s not like flipping a switch.

A pilot project based on adding a single new digital channel could provide insight into what you’ll need to change or do differently. These learnings will make it easier as you standardize on a headless or composable commerce architecture. You’ll also be able to set more ambitious targets to maximize the potential of specific use cases.

5. Think of continuous improvement as a metric

Brands always want to do better in terms of serving their customers, but they don’t always measure it.

If you migrate to composable commerce, you can use cost, time to execute, and degree of internal efforts as part of a more holistic continuous improvement metric. In other words, resolving the headless vs. composable commerce debate is really about overcoming the rigidity of traditional eCommerce architecture.

Why does composable commerce matter?

Online shopping is only going to get more competitive, just as customer expectations are only going to rise.

A composable commerce platform gives you a foundation to address both of those business issues at once, especially when you have help to get you there.

Suvae.org, for example, can play a pivotal role as you migrate to composable commerce or headless commerce. Our product feed management and social commerce solutions are designed to simplify integration with third-party marketplaces and digital channels.

On the other hand, the orchestration capabilities of Suvae.org can reduce the complexity of putting together different parts of a composable architecture instance.

In fact, Suvae.org can be classified as a vertical composable commerce platform because our solutions are wholly focused on commerce channels, rather than integrations pertaining to systems such as the PIM or ERP.

Let’s talk about how we can get your journey to headless or composable commerce started.

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Inventory Management Tools for Multichannel Ecommerce: What’s the Value? https://Suvae.org/inventory-management-tools-for-multichannel-ecommerce/ Thu, 07 Jul 2022 11:23:03 +0000 https://Suvae.org/?p=12399 In the story of every successful eCommerce business, its inventory management tool is always the unsung hero. That’s as it should be. When you’re running a luxury brand, you need to keep your customer focused on the digital experience they see, and of course the styles and quality of the products you’re selling. Consumers should […]

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In the story of every successful eCommerce business, its inventory management tool is always the unsung hero. That’s as it should be.

When you’re running a luxury brand, you need to keep your customer focused on the digital experience they see, and of course the styles and quality of the products you’re selling.

Consumers should never have to think about the way you approach effective inventory management – even though it represents a critical element in keeping them satisfied and loyal.

What is Inventory Management?

You’re only as valuable to customers as your ability to supply them with what they want. That’s the real definition of inventory management: a way to eliminate the risk of disappointing shoppers.

Think through the typical eCommerce customer journey: they visit a website or marketplace and spend minutes or even hours contemplating a purchase.

When the moment of truth comes, they click “Buy” or “Add to cart.”

If the words “Item not in stock” comes up, the only option is to have them join a waitlist and to recommend alternate products. In many cases, of course, the customer will likely choose to shop elsewhere, perhaps never to return.

Inventory management is also critical during the fulfillment process. In fact, a recent survey found nearly half of consumers feel that delivering correct and accurate orders is essential to earning their trust.

Why use Omnichannel Inventory Management?

Why use omnichannel inventory management

Many brands find effective inventory management relatively simple if they are primarily focused on physical retail with only one or two locations.

Things get much more complex as you pursue a growth strategy, particularly as you add eCommerce channels beyond your own web site.
Third-party marketplaces
such as Amazon or Zalando can offer exposure to a larger number of shoppers, for instance. Selling through social media services such as Facebook and Instagram, meanwhile, can ensure your brand is top of mind when consumers are ready to buy.

This is where brands typically look for a retail inventory management system.
Operating as an omnichannel seller depends upon being able keep on top of stock and respond to sudden changes in customer demand. You need real-time visibility into inventory and sales updates across every channel, along with integrations with third-party eCommerce platforms and advanced reporting capabilities.

According to a study of eCommerce merchants conducted earlier this year, almost a quarter (22%) now operate three different distribution centers. These warehouses may be spread across multiple countries or even continents. Choosing the right eCommerce inventory management software ensures you can decentralize the process of tracking and fulfilling orders and never giving customers an unpleasant surprise.

How to overcome the complexity of Omnichannel Inventory Management for Marketplaces

How to overcome the complexity of omnichannel

As you consider which inventory management tool is right for your brand, keep in mind the following considerations:

Determine the scope and complexity of inventory splits

Your business goals might include making your products available to any customer who wants them, regardless of location, but that means being able to manage your catalog at a per-warehouse level.

Traditional retail inventory management systems usually don’t offer inventory splitting to address specific marketplace or market scenarios. Unless you have the in-house capabilities to completely customize your tech stack, inventory splitting is an essential component of an eCommerce inventory management system.

Evaluate the current and future cadence of inventory updates

Perhaps you’re a retailer where inventory updates are happening once an hour, at which point the values of your products are changed across multiple third-party marketplaces.

As your sales activity continues to grow, however, that cadence might not be frequent enough to prevent stockouts and cancelled items. Marketplaces naturally frown upon merchants where this happens regularly because it reflects on their customer experience as well as the merchant.

Instead, look for an inventory management tool that can update marketplace inventory even more often than your eCommerce channel. With an order reservation algorithm, for instance, you’ll be able to support less frequent inventory updates for products that may have limited availability.

Think through marketplace-specific needs for inventory thresholds

A physical store operating in a bustling city will need to have more inventory on hand than one set up in a remote rural community. In a similar way, some marketplaces will prove more effective for you as a sales channel than others.

Make sure you opt for an eCommerce inventory management system that allows you to take a more granular approach to controlling the minimum stock you’ll need to satisfy customers based on where they’re most likely to shop.

What Suvae.org brings to eCommerce Inventory Management

Growing your eCommerce sales often leads to working with a wide ecosystem of channels and marketplaces, and getting the details right demands a best-in-class inventory management tool.

Suvae.org embeds eCommerce inventory management capabilities that can act as a hub between your products and all the channels where you want to sell them. This includes synchronizing inventory for marketplaces with warehouses and stores.

Book a free consultation with us to learn what effective inventory management could look like for your business.

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Multi-Marketplace Integration Guide: Manage Orders Anywhere https://Suvae.org/multi-marketplace-integration-guide/ Wed, 15 Jun 2022 08:00:47 +0000 https://Suvae.org/?p=12275 Offering eCommerce on your site is sort of like hosting a party in your home, filled with people you know and some guests you welcome in for the first time. Extending your eCommerce capabilities through marketplace integration, on the other hand, is like attending a high society gala, where you have the chance to significantly […]

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Offering eCommerce on your site is sort of like hosting a party in your home, filled with people you know and some guests you welcome in for the first time.

Extending your eCommerce capabilities through marketplace integration, on the other hand, is like attending a high society gala, where you have the chance to significantly expand your social circle with a vast number of new connections.

A more obvious analogy is a retailer that not only sets up standalone stores but opens up additional locations within major shopping centers.
Much like being present on social media platforms and search engines, multi-marketplace integration has proven key to success as an omnichannel retailer.

Why Online Marketplaces are a Growth Driver for Omnichannel Retailers

According to a survey conducted by PYMTS, for example, 61% of online merchants say they have increased their marketplace usage in the last year. This isn’t limited to a single third-party store such as Amazon, either. The research showed that 42% of retailers sell through four or more marketplaces.

Why-online-marketplaces-are-a-growth-driver

The traditional drawback of listing products on sites such as Mango, Lamoda, Zalando, and others has been the cost and effort onboarding required.
Some of the potential bottlenecks have included:

  • Difficulty managing inventory and orders across multiple marketplaces at once
  • Managing customer relationships across more than one third-party store
  • Lack of consistent branding and messaging from one store to another
  • Difficulty controlling pricing, logistics, and custom interactions

What is eCommerce Marketplace Integration?

The rise of eCommerce marketplace integration services is providing online retailers a way to transcend these issues by unifying data from multiple sources.

By using an application programming interface (API) for example, marketplace integration tools can act as a two-way link that connects a single selling platform to many different third-party stores at once.
This includes connecting to inventory, mapping product uploads to their proper category, transferring data, syncing across channels, and fulfilling orders in real-time.

Once eCommerce marketplace integration has been deployed, you can syndicate your product listings and catalogs to multiple online marketplaces.
Also, you can more easily track and manage orders, keep stock of inventory, and spend more time focusing on nurturing customer relationships.

How eCommerce Marketplace Integration Services Work

Your goal with marketplace integration should be to reach a point of “agnostic eCommerce.” In other words, you want to be focused on simply driving sales, without having to worry about which marketplace your orders are coming from.

Achieving this without putting undue burdens on developers means working with an expert eCommerce marketplace service partner that can identify the best approach.

These can vary depending on the retailer but include:

Complete and thorough object specifications

While customer activity might look different from one third-party store to another, there might be common use cases in terms of what’s required to support taxation, returns, refunds, and partial orders.
Choose the order schemas that apply to the majority of your orders to simplify the integration process.

Extensible object specifications

Even in a well-run eCommerce operation, anomalies or exceptions to the rule will occasionally come up.
Talk to your marketplace integration provider about how they can handle custom properties, such as pairs of names and values, or other unforeseen data requirements.

Acceptable actions

The more you can automate eCommerce processes, the more streamlined your company is and the greater the potential for increased sales.
By specifying a list of what actions the integration tool can take depending on the API response and payloads, you’ll have greater confidence in the status of your orders.

Configurable process sequences

Talk to your partner about the way you’ll handle pre-accepted orders, or when orders are postponed after an inventory check.
Doing so will offer greater consistency in the customer experience you deliver, no matter what marketplace they’re using to shop for your products.

Escape routes

What if none of the above tactics work? The best market integration service providers know that sometimes it’s necessary to leverage specific fields in the order schema.
This is a way of programmatically determining which marketplace is being used and allowing orders to be processed smoothly.

Master the art of eCommerce Order Management across third-party stores

Suvae.org has a proven track record of helping leading fashion and luxury brands propel their online sales by expanding into the world’s most popular online marketplaces. While eCommerce order management can be relatively simple when order volumes are small, successful brands have learned they need to have visibility into control at every stage of the process. This includes the moment a purchase has been made, identifying fulfillment locations, shipping, and handling returns.

Suvae.org’s solution offers the ability to scale order management in third-party marketplaces through direct integrations. That not only means keeping up with orders as they come in but streamlining returns and analyzing performance. This can fuel growth across multiple countries.

Discover a unique approach to Marketplace Integration to help you generate more profit, and increase your eCommerce sales. Reach out to us to get started.

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How Outsourcing Facebook Shop Order Management Can Accelerate Growth https://Suvae.org/how-outsourcing-facebook-shop-order-management-can-accelerate-growth/ Fri, 01 Oct 2021 13:01:06 +0000 https://Suvae.org/?p=10208 The post How Outsourcing Facebook Shop Order Management Can Accelerate Growth appeared first on Suvae.org.

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A Facebook Shop represents an invaluable sales channel for your business. Maintaining one allows you to reach your audience where they spend most of their time, enabling them to purchase products directly through their social network of choice.
In other words, it allows you to directly leverage your brand’s social presence to drive more sales.

Like any marketplace, however, Facebook Shops doesn’t come without certain caveats. The platform requires a certain degree of technical capability where order management is concerned. And its help documentation isn’t always clear on what’s required for a seller.

Getting approved to sell on the platform is a process in and of itself. You need to submit comprehensive documentation to Facebook on everything from your business details and your banking information to your customer service and return policies. Once you’re approved to sell, next comes dealing with Facebook Shop Order Management.

Let’s dive into the ways you can scale your Instagram and Facebook Shop order management processes.

Why You Need a Third-Party Facebook/Instagram Shop Order Management Solution

For brands, the order management process is tedious and time-consuming. If you’re managing fewer than fifty orders a month only on Facebook, or plan to sell via only a single brand, you can probably deal with all of this manually.
Here’s what the typical order management process looks like for individual and bulk orders:

Using Facebook Shop for Individual Orders

  1. After being notified that a purchase has been made, open Facebook Commerce Manager, Select Orders, then Select “Waiting to be Shipped”.
  2. Once the order has been shipped, follow the same process again, and mark the order as shipped.
  3. If there is a single item or multiple items sent in a single shipment, check Mark All Items as Shipped. Otherwise, note the quantity of each item included in each shipment.
  4. Select the shipping carrier and provide tracking information for the order to Facebook.
  5. Provide the fulfillment location to Facebook so it can calculate sales tax.
  6. Select Review Shipment, and make sure all information is accurate.

Using Facebook Shop for Bulk Orders

  1. Select Manage Orders in Bulk from the Orders Tab.
  2. Select Export Orders.
  3. Choose a date range, select Orders that can be fulfilled, then Export File. This will download a CSV file of your orders.
  4. Open the CSV file.
  5. Fill out the information on quantity, shipping carrier, tracking numbers, and (optionally) location, then save the file.
  6. Import the edited CSV file back into Commerce Manager.

As you might expect, the higher your sales volume, the more untenable your Facebook Shop order management becomes.
And the order management isn’t even the most time-consuming thing you’ll have to deal with, either. That honor goes to Facebook’s process for managing product returns, particularly when it comes to adjusting the taxes paid on a return.

Scaling sales and growth requires automation to eliminate manual processes from your workflows, especially if you want to capitalize on growth opportunities through the dynamic Facebook and Instagram Shop channels. That’s where the right order management platform comes into play.

With effective automation, you can reduce the technical burden required to integrate Facebook Shop, automate tax adjustments for product returns, and scale growth across multiple brand pages & shops — all in one location.
That’s countless hours saved, fewer mistakes, and more efficient workflows.

Move Fast With a Third-Party Facebook Shop Solution

Third-party Facebook Shop order management tools are fully supported by Facebook. Simply put, you can — and in many cases, should — work with an external vendor.
The benefit? It will significantly reduce your workload and make it much easier for your business (or businesses) to scale.

Once you are approved to sell on Facebook Shops, you can start working with the tool right away. Suvae.org supports the Instagram and Facebook Shop order management fulfillment process, so you don’t have to.

Here Is how it works:

Suvae.org integrates directly with Facebook Commerce, automatically populating order information and considerably streamlining the return process.

More importantly, if you plan to sell under multiple brands, you can manage all of them via a single page, creating unique order management flows for each page ID. In other words, you can manage larger order quantities, scale more effectively, and more efficiently deal with returns and taxes — in addition to gleaning deep insights through performance metrics and selling in multiple markets.

Dive deeper into social commerce and overcome your Facebook Shop order management issues with Suvae.org.

Contact us to find out more about how we can help.

The post How Outsourcing Facebook Shop Order Management Can Accelerate Growth appeared first on Suvae.org.

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