Blog Highlights:

• Are you bleeding money during high volume order days (Black Friday, Boxing Day, Cyber Monday, etc) because of your current eCommerce store and back-office set-up?
• Why is it important to connect your NetSuite (back-office) to your marketplace
• NetSuite and Amazon Seller Central Integration (Amazon FBA)
• Dropped orders because of miscommunication between the e-commerce platform and your back-office?
• How to overcome inaccurate inventory counts that cause back-order or mistakenly mark your items as “sold out”
• ERP to Marketplace (Amazon, eBay, Walmart, Shopify, etc) connector solutions for e-commerce businesses

Why Online Businesses Are Losing Millions During E-Commerce Events

How much revenue do you think your e-commerce store lost last Black Friday? What about on Boxing day?

This latest Thanksgiving weekend, Costco suffered an online outage as their website crashed on Thanksgiving day, for about 16.5 hours. What do the experts estimate was the cost of not being able to process online orders at full capacity for this retail giant? According to an article from Business Insider, Costco’s eCommerce platform could have lost as much as $10.9 million in sales in that one single day.⁶

That shouldn’t be surprising to you if you’ve been following the annual growth of online retail during Black Friday. This year’s digital sales went up by nearly 20%, according to Forbes, with online retailers raking in an estimate of $7.4 billion across the globe. This year’s retail holiday is now considered the second-largest ever eCommerce buying day - of all time! What’s in the first place? Cyber Monday last year - which reportedly brought in a whopping $7.9 billion in sales during a 24 hour period.⁷ 

Let’s dive a little deeper. With over 12 marketplaces in USA, Canada, UK, Germany, France and 7 more countries across the globe, the total of product sales for Amazon sellers in just 2017 totaled $118.57 billion (a large spike from the $94.67 million the year prior)².

It’s no secret that buying and selling online is taking over from the traditional brick and store model of operating for retailers. As of October 2019, there are nearly 3 million active sellers on Amazon alone³. Meanwhile, Walmart brought in 10 million new products to its online portfolio of offerings with only half a million being items directly sold by Walmart⁴.

Amazon’s Annual Net Revenue Growth 2004-2018
(in billions / U.S. dollars)

The reality is that the world of electronic commerce is quickly becoming one of the most thriving and competitive industries in the world. The margin for errors and gaps in customer service is shrinking and if you don’t have the right system infrastructure in place to support the kind of growth potential that the market represents, you are likely bleeding revenue that you are not even aware of. If you’re using NetSuite ERP for your back-office and fulfillment by Amazon (FBA) or another popular e-commerce platform like eBay, it might be time to look into the right solution to streamline your operations.

You would be surprised at how costly it can become for an e-commerce business to maintain two disparate systems - even with a rotating team of finance professionals to coordinate information between your marketplaces and ERP.

Here Are the 4 Common Symptoms That Your Revenue is Being Impacted:

1. You have an increasing number of dropped orders because of miscommunication between your e-commerce platform and your back-office
2. Your orders are just not going through as fast as you’d like...
3. Your inventory counts are inaccurate causing back-order or your items are being marked as sold out when you still have them across different warehouses
4. You are not getting the right amount of visibility into your data quickly enough to react – and that is costing you potentially millions in a single day (the big retail holidays are the most important days for most e-commerce businesses in your industry)

Do any of these resonate with you? You’ll want to keep reading.

How a NetSuite Amazon Connector Can Drastically Increase Your Revenue

Let’s look at how you can be successful with your Amazon Seller Central and make life easier for your back office. As an online retailer that relies on Amazon FBA for your sales, your priority should be simultaneously delivering the smoothest possible customer service and having accurate inventory information and updated pricing across all your products on Amazon’s web store.

In order to manage these two priorities, the reality is that you will need a seamless integration between Amazon and your NetSuite ERP, so that you can almost effortlessly map out data flows for everything from products and inventory orders, fulfillments, to (whether you’re using fulfillment by Amazon or not) payments, refunds and cancellations. This where a NetSuite Amazon Integration powerhouse like Dell Boomi comes into play.

If your processes are slow or your inventory counts aren’t updated (for example, a simple mistake causes Amazon to display an item as sold out when you still have 20 in one of your warehouses), you will lose sales. That is a guarantee. You might think to yourself: What’s one sale every now and then? How much impact could little mistakes like these have on my bottom line? Well, let’s consider it this way - if you lose just 1 order a day, that means that you will have lost 365 orders by the end of the year. How much does that cost you? Now consider that annual loss - how much will that cost you in 3 or 5 years? By the way, 1 loss a day is a low park number that doesn’t account for the top e-commerce holidays, where that single loss can add up very quickly.

Here’s the good news - there are solutions out there for your business model. 

Let's say you're an online retailer. You have a storefront on Amazon Seller Central and you’re currently using NetSuite’s cloud platform for your financials. Rather than spend hours copying and pasting each order into NetSuite (at GURUS, we call this a swivel-chair solution, because it’s literally a person swiveling back and forth between systems to match up data), a simple set of integrations can automatically keep everything in sync without any manual work. 

When you add or change a product in NetSuite, your Dell Boomi integration syncs product information like inventory, pricing information, product images, and related information to Amazon Seller Central. When you have a new order, the integration syncs your customer order and item information. This includes information such as items on the order, the order’s total, the customer’s payment method, and any tax information. 

Next, the fulfillment is synced between NetSuite and Amazon (see below).

On this fulfillment, you can see that we have the box, the weight of the fulfillment and the tracking number.

When the order ships, Amazon captures the payment from the customer and the payment method is recorded in NetSuite. Should a customer require a return or refund, the return will be processed in Amazon and a credit memo will be created in the next week to complete the process.

Where GURUS Solutions’ NetSuite & Boomi Specialists Can Help:

GURUS Solutions has an expansive team across Canada and the U.S. with over 15 years of experience in the NetSuite ecosystem, from implementation to integrations. As a certified Dell Boomi integration partner, we have a portfolio of e-commerce clients that include both online-only sales and both online and brick and mortar store hybrid retailers. 

Due to our extensive experience and knowledge in the area, we have managed to launch over 2500 successful projects for our clients in almost every category of NetSuite and Boomi work and development. When you choose to work with the pros at GURUS, you get all that expertise applied to your project.

Full disclosure here: I work for GURUS - and I can tell you they’re the real deal when it comes to Amazon Connector NetSuite solutions. 

You can fill out the form on the side-bar or lower on the page - or find more information on their Boomi page here.

References

• ¹ Source: the balance
• ² Source: feedbackexpress
• ³ Source: Marketplace Pulse
• ⁴ Source: Marketplace Pulse
• ⁵ Source: Statistica
• ⁶ Source: Business Insider
• ⁷ Source: Forbes

PS: For more great articles like this, I recommend you check out 4 Best NetSuite Integrations For Your Business, The 5 Big Market Trends You Need to Watch for in 2020-2021 and How Does NetSuite Work with Shopify? Here’s A Guide.