Your Fulfillment Supply Chain is Evolving – Now What?

To quote the late, great, Gorilla Monsoon, Amazon has been and will continue to be both the irresistible force and the immovable object. For many companies, maintaining a healthy relationship with Amazon Vendor Central is of the utmost importance.

The issue for enterprises is that while selling through Amazon Vendor Central can expand your customer reach, it can also be extremely costly if you make mistakes. Additionally, evolving consumer expectations means your business is held to Amazon-like standards for things such as expedited shipping and easy returns.

Organizations that are not EDI-compliant with Amazon run the risk of having unreliable data. Tighter integrations between systems and logistics partners are necessary to promote healthy inventory management and EDI software data reliability and accuracy.

Mastering Amazon Vendor Central

Amazon Vendor Central is a web interface that is used by suppliers, whether they are manufacturers or distributors, that allows Amazon to sell their goods. Essentially, Amazon acts as a full-time distributor, by buying and storing inventory while handling shipping and pricing, customer service, and returns.

The tricky part to navigate is that Amazon maintains stringent guidelines for fulfilling orders. Because Amazon Vendor Central is so dependent on EDI for purchase order, advanced shipping notice, and other types of fulfillment data, it is very punitive around late or inaccurate data. Companies that do utilize Amazon Vendor Central require reliable and resilient integration so it can remain EDI-compliant with Amazon and eliminate any lost revenue due to costly chargebacks.

Speaking of chargebacks, Amazon chargebacks for non-compliant EDI can be as much as 1% of product costs for late POAs or POA changes, $5-$150 for a late ASN, and 2 percent to 6 percent of the product cost for non-compliant ASNs. These costs can get out of control in a hurry.

Seamlessly Connect To and From Amazon

When companies make the decision to upgrade and modernize their EDI solution, one of the biggest benefits comes from an application connector. A modernized EDI platform provides an Amazon Marketplace connector that facilitates frictionless data connectivity and API integration for the Amazon Seller Central platform as well as robust EDI and application integration for Amazon Vendor Central.

Amazon remains a valuable digital storefront for many different companies and merchants, no matter the industry, but without the proper integrations, companies will find it difficult to manage Amazon’s tricky rules to follow. Maintaining e-commerce success is powered by ecosystem interactions across Amazon Marketplace within your business applications and your key trading partners.

Cleo Integration Cloud allows enterprises to integrate Amazon Marketplace for digitally fluid end-to-end business processes. By doing so, companies can eliminate complexity with API flows for data on transactions, products, competing items, and more. The connector also allows enterprises to easily add, update, query, and delete information with Amazon Marketplace, and integrate to ERP and CRM fulfillment systems to align data between front-end and back-end systems.

These are just a few reasons why so many enterprises have turned to a modernized EDI platform in order to automate purchase order and ASN transactions between the Amazon marketplace and back-end systems to ensure accurate order-to-cash and fulfillment processes. Don’t get left behind by your competitors, the time to modernize is now.

Modernize Your EDI