Today, Ebay Marketplace is one of the prime selling avenues for merchants online. Mostly, customers prefer eBay because they have different options made available by different retailers to shop online with. Again, you may find a number of sellers to do business with; eBay gives you the platform where you can sell your items which you no longer need. “Ease of Use” and cost-effectiveness is what makes eBay most popular in recent years.
So, you might be thinking that after all this benefits, where the ERP comes into the picture or where is the need to integrate? Now, let’s present the challenges which may incur if eBay run in silos:
- Increased Cost due to continuous administration on time-starved employees who have to manually extract the transactional data from marketplace and fed to your ERP software.
- Being an online auction site, consumers daily deals or do business with products worth millions, so it’s quite risky if there is any sort of data entry errors.
- Difficultly in replenishing inventory during increased order volume.
- Keeping your product listing up-to-date with continuous feeding of new products
Therefore, for fully harnessing the benefits which an ERP can provide such as inventory management, account management, sales cycle etc, APPSeCONNECT easily fits as an Integration mechanism that automates synchronization of information between these 2 disparate platforms resolving the problem of repetitive administration ; thus optimizing your business functions.
Let’s have a quick look on some key-benefits of Integration:
- Significant reduction in Order fulfillment time.
- Reduction in Operational costs and removing the problem arising due to repetitive data entry.
- Automatic inventory replenishment by syncing ERP stock updates from multiple warehouses to the marketplace and avoiding “out-of-stock” situation during heavy order volume.
- Automatic notification to the customers once orders are shipped and allow them to track the delivery of products.
- Updated product information visibility in marketplace along with their prices.
- Easier shipment tracking
And lots more….
Currently, APPSeCONNECT offers integration of eBay with ERPs viz. MS Dynamics NAV and SAP B1.
Here is the snapshot view of the synchronization points provided for eBay and SAP B1 Integration:
- Customer Sync
APPSeCONNECT automates the synchronization of eBay customers purchasing from corresponding seller account product list as SAP B1 business partners. Thus, it becomes easier to know your potential customers and send marketing updates. And also to send them notifications when orders are shipped.
- Item Sync
Allows Sync of Item information from ERP to eBay. So SAP goods and Item groups are listed in eBay as Fixed Price Products and eBay Product Categories respectively. Maintaining Item information in ERP aids in Material requirement planning purpose, for better inventory forecasts, daily product updates.
- Stock Update
Real time stock replenishment in blink of an eye, as soon as the eBay fixed price item goes out of stock to avoid shipment delays.
- Sales Order Sync
With integration in place, seamless/real time flow of eBay orders to SAP is nick of time job where they can be picked, packed and shipped quickly. This in turn reduces the overall order cycle time. There is no need to wait until new orders are fetched, extracted and manually entered in ERP, which in most cases are the main reason for shipping delays.
- Payment/Payment Method Sync
On every successful transaction through payment gateway for eBay Orders, APPSeCONNECT returns a transaction id and payment method details in ERP in their respective Sales documents.
- Delivery Sync
SAP Delivery documents were synced back to eBay as one step further in the process of Order fulfillment, to provide real time Order status update to the customers on the shipment details and tracking information to keep track of their ordered items.
Thus, with up-to-date information on products, Stock availability on real time, auto update of order tracking information in place, your business staff have the tool and the information they require for providing better customer experience.
And as one of the famous saying goes
“The well satisfied customer will bring the repeat sale that counts. – JC Penney”
