If you are a seller on Amazon, eBay or any other online marketplace, you will have the access to its backend operations where you can publish your product, update the inventory and see the payment reports. In this competitive world, sellers want their products to reach out to the maximum people and for you to compete with them, it is necessary to be in every major marketplace. Managing every marketplace on an individual level is frustrating because it is a monotonous process and every market has a different backend. It is a complete waste of time and resources of a proprietor. So how can one overcome this and integrate all the marketplaces in one platform? The answer is ERP. An open source ERP platform like Odoo can help online sellers bring all the major marketplaces in one place. The same platform is also designed to take care of your inventory, marketing and logistics.
Forecast your stock in better ways with the integration
Today, most people have their online sales on multiple channels like Amazon and eBay. In that situation, you have to order the replenishment stock all at once from your vendor. If Amazon, eBay and other marketplaces are not integrated with an open source ERP, how will you forecast your inventory? It does not make sense to order only from Amazon. Instead, use an Amazon Odoo connector and get a holistic view of all your stocks.
An integration of all your marketplaces with an ERP solution will help you to have a better stock control and prevent unnecessary overheads related to the stock. With seamless integration between two systems, you can eliminate the “out of stock” scenario as the ERP system can update inventory to all the marketplaces automatically on a regular basis.
Automate the acknowledgment to the third-party warehouse from the ERP management of third-party warehouse is one of the important aspects of business. It is not always possible for a business to have its own warehouse and ship directly from there. More and more people are moving towards third-party warehouse and logistics or FBA services by Amazon. So in this kind of situation, where the stock is managed by a third-party vendor and operations are being performed inside Amazon seller account, it is very much difficult for a seller to acknowledge shipments, carrier updates, delivery orders and inventory from seller account to their system via manual file exchange. Any mistake or delay can cause a huge loss in terms of time, money, seller rankings or customer review. Integrating the third-party warehouse option with an open source ERP like Odoo ensures that your inventory is always managed smoothly, and there are no mistakes.
Better accounting
Preparing a profit and loss statement is not that simple even for a seasoned accountant if you have sales coming from a variety of different channels. One of the major advantages of integrating an ERP with various online marketplaces is that the integration automates your accounting by synchronising all the settlement reports with the ERP solution in a real time. So for instance, by integrating Amazon settlement statement with Odoo, it will automatically reconcile each statement line with proper accounts configured in a settlement report journal that can be set in Amazon Instance at Odoo. What else can anyone expect from an ERP solution? After all, cumulative accounting reports will give you clear idea of profitability. That can be done right inside Odoo only because it will have the accounting data from other sales channels too. It is worth noting here that not only in auto-reconciliation but the integration of Amazon into Odoo can benefit you by auto invoicing and sending Amazon invoices to your customer automatically via email. All this allows you to create reimbursement invoices to Amazon from payment report.
Improve customer services by processing your orders quickly
Just imagine if you are using an ERP for your other sales channels and managing Amazon seller operations separately without the same solution. First of all, you have to update the status of your Amazon and eBay orders separately each time when some updates or shipments are being performed. Also, your employee needs to do data entry on two different systems. Multiple platforms have their own way of getting data from end users. When the end-user has to enter the data for two or more platforms, chances of errors will be increased. Manual practices such as hand-keying Amazon sale orders and especially update product information in Excel and then uploading to the online marketplace is a big pain.
Relying on decimating inventory across your systems by hand, or not being able to do it all, can cause you to oversell. When these processes are not automated, it is easy to make mistakes. Delivery addresses may be entered wrong. Incorrect inventory levels can lead to overselling. Product information could also be incomplete, incorrect or missing. By seamless integration of online orders with an open source ERP and once you update your shipment and carrier-related information on the solution, the system will automatically update the status at that particular marketplace. Products and pricing can be managed from one place, allowing you to have accurate and consistent product information from the ERP.
If you have not integrated an online marketplace with an open source ERP, it is never too late to do it. Integrating an ERP platform is definitely going to help your business process as a whole. Do comment below if you have integrated it and how it has helped your business.
