Streamlining manual processes: why a fuller integration of marketplaces like Amazon or eBay is better for multichannel eCommerce sellers

In this fifth and final blog post in a series on multichannel selling, we look at the challenge of duplicative manual processes on multiple channels and how deeper and wider integrations enable you to scale better for the long term.

Multichannel selling has become a necessity for eCommerce businesses aiming to scale their growth and profitability. Amazon and eBay are two of the most influential marketplaces, offering vast audiences and significant sales potential. However, managing these platforms effectively can be challenging. When you add in other marketplaces and webstores, your staff are performing essentially the same steps, but in multiple places and in slightly different ways to fit each specific channel.

Sellers often choose between providers offering fuller or lighter integration with these channels. Pricing, as you might imagine, generally reflects the level of integration. While a lighter integration may seem simpler and cheaper, a deeper integration offers substantial advantages that can drive sustainable growth and profitability – in other words, better return on investment. Here are seven areaswhere broader and deeper channel integration – by which we mean more ecommerce business areas and more functions within each area – is better for multichannel ecommerce sellers.

1. Supply chain and purchasing

No or light integration of the purchasing and supply sides means that your business is not joined up and you can’t easily track what you paid for which products and how that relates to what your customers paid. Deeper integration of your supply chain and purchasing provides better financial transparency in turn delivering more profitable business, which allows you to scale your growth.

2. Warehouse and inventory management

Deeper integration to fully track the movement of your products from supply to delivery is important for avoiding logistical issues, stockouts and overselling. With lighter integration, updates from suppliers or on inventory levels might be delayed or inaccurate, for example, leading to customer dissatisfaction and potential penalties from the marketplaces.

3. Products and listings

A lighter integration typically automates the order management and updates to stock and pricing, but doesn’t take care of product handling, meaning you have to create and manage listings directly on each channel, which is time-consuming and therefore ineffective. Deeper integrations centralise the product information and listing management processes so that you can do everything from one place.

4. Marketplaces and webstores

The largest marketplaces and webstore platforms are each a vast collection of rules, functions and workflows which are regularly being updated and added to. The lighter the integration, the more gaps there are in the functional coverage. The deeper integrations focus on incorporating as many of the native channel functions into the centralised system to maximise productivity.   

5. Order management

Managing orders from multiple channels can be cumbersome with a lighter integration, often needing manual interventions which are prone to errors and delays. A deeper integration automates order processing, consolidating orders from all your selling other channels into a single system, resulting in a better customer experience and improved operational efficiency.

6. Customer communications

No or light integration means unproductive and fragmented customer service operations, where messages and issues are managed separately and often manually for each channel. Deeper integrations centralise all customer interactions and automate repetitive functions to provide a better, more trustworthy experience.

7. Data and analytics

Lighter integration may provide fragmented intelligence and limited data insights, making it difficult to get a complete and up-to-date picture of your business performance. Without comprehensive analytics, making informed decisions is a challenge. Advanced analytics and reporting tools present data across the business and all channels, enabling better decision-making and more effective strategy development.

All eCommerce software providers will tell you they have comprehensive integrations into key marketplaces like Amazon and eBay and webstore platforms like Magento and Shopify. This, after all, is the promise of such a system: streamlined multichannel selling and shipping. These selling channels are vast, however, and regularly update their structure, functionality and connections, which requires a continuous integration approach.

The truth is, all providers have gaps in their integration coverage that require you to do things directly on the channel. If you buy into the argument that the broader and deeper the integration is, the better for your long-term productivity and success, your challenge becomes identifying the major functions you do want integrated, and the minor ones you can live without.

You can get in touch with us here to discuss this in more detail.