The Complete Guide to Amazon Seller Central Integration
Subhajit Goswami
Direct and Channel Sales Leadership | Expertise in Strategic Account and Relationship Management
Online commerce is currently one of the largest industries globally, where startups to large-scale enterprises are adopting digital commerce platforms as one of their core channels for carrying out business. While there exist several platforms to get started with eCommerce, when it comes to online marketplaces there is no bigger name than Amazon. Through Amazon Seller Central, Amazon provides a digital interface for brands and vendors to directly market and sell their products to the wider customer base shopping through Amazon. With?over 220 million unique visitors on Amazon , the platform offers wider exposure to merchants expanding their operations into online marketplaces. However, the platform alone cannot manage the operations of a company. Amazon Seller Central integration with other line-of-business applications thus becomes prudent to ensure automation and faster business processing. Let us take a deep dive into what Amazon Seller Central is and how its integration can unlock previously untapped business potential!
What is Amazon Seller Central and What are its Benefits
Amazon Seller Central is an online platform provided by Amazon to brands and retailers to directly market and sell globally through their website. Sellers directly list their products with the respective item descriptions, prices, etc., and through the Seller Central dashboard monitor and manage inventory, pricing, and advertising. The platform also provides sellers with options on how to manage the logistics for their order fulfillment. Through Fulfilled by Amazon (FBA), the inventory stocking and the order delivery process is managed by Amazon, while with Fulfilled by Merchant (FBM) the vendor manages the order fulfillment.
Advantages of Amazon Seller Central for Businesses
Go-to eCommerce platform for customers
Amazon is a globally trusted platform and is the go-to website for customers to search for a product. With Amazon.com garnering?over 2 billion combined desktop and mobile visits ?every month, companies selling through Amazon drastically increase the likelihood of their products getting discovered. Selling through Amazon also helps build trust for the buyers, increasing the chances of purchase.
Access to a worldwide market
With Amazon, the seller is not limited to marketing and selling their goods to the limited region of their locality. Amazon’s logistics network for worldwide delivery enables a seller to not only sell on a national level but to expand their operations to a global scale as well.
Flexibility in order fulfillment
As we have previously discussed, Amazon offers flexible options for vendors to deliver their orders. The option to either ship through Amazon or have the merchant make the order fulfillment themselves allows the seller to choose the delivery option that is best suited for the order. Through self-delivery, the merchant uses their own delivery service or contracts a third-party delivery service for the shipping. Fulfilled by Amazon, on the other hand, takes care of the entire logistics process from inventory storage to shipping and upon order delivery, transfers the payment to the seller’s registered bank account.
Easier scalability for businesses
With the option provided by Amazon for managing the storage of inventory and shipment, businesses do not have to focus on spending resources to increase their inventory space, workforce, and other logistics, as all of it gets managed by Amazon. This allows for easier scalability and expansion of operations.
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Targeted marketing to customers
Having a targeted marketing strategy for a product is necessary for increasing sales. Amazon’s marketing algorithm directs relevant advertisements to customers who are searching for such products and are interested in buying them, making the marketing process more targeted and optimizing the ROI (Return on Investment).
In the following sections, we will discuss how the integration of Amazon Seller Central with the back-end ERP solution can enable companies to streamline their operations and achieve automation of their business processes.
Achieving Business Process Automation Through ERP and Amazon Seller Central Integration
With the vast volume of data generated while operating through Amazon Seller Central, ensuring workflow agility and flexibility is impossible without automation. Automation through integration eliminates data redundancies and input errors, streamlines all eCommerce processes, removes the need for a bigger workforce to manage bulk processes, and increases time-to-market speeds. Amazon Seller Central integration with an ERP application brings in the advantages of automation needed to gain a competitive edge. Integration of an ERP with Amazon Seller Central enables streamlining of business workflows across the entire software stack and makes them work in synchronization.
The advantages offered by Amazon Seller Central and ERP integration include:
Reduced Cost of Manual Workflow
The back-end ERP solution needs to keep track of all the transactions taking place through the webstore to store, manage and communicate the customer data to other applications in the system to complete the order. Without automation that can systematically transfer all the relevant information, the order data must be transferred manually across the applications. For a smaller volume of orders, manual management without errors is possible, however with escalating numbers of orders ensuring speed of data transfer while ensuring its accuracy becomes unmanageable without increasing the workforce of the organization. Amazon Seller Central integration with an ERP automates the data entry process and reduces the workforce needed.
Improved Time to Market
Manual data listing item data to the Amazon webstore and then updating to the ERP platform is a time taking process. Multiple parameters such as product description, price list, inventory levels, etc. Valuable time lost in manually updating those data can slow down time to market, preventing businesses from capitalizing on fast-changing consumer trends. With an automated Amazon Seller Central integration with the ERP system, all data gets updated instantaneously which causes negligible delays and increases faster time to market for businesses.
Elimination of Data Redundancies
Having a human element in the bulk repetitive process of transferring data across multiple systems also increases the risk of errors in data entry. Any manual errors entered in the network get perpetuated across all systems making it extremely difficult and time consuming to identify the error source and rectify it. By offloading the data synchronization to automation and removing the human element from the process, any scenario of data redundancy gets removed.