Dec 16, 2015
Optimizing seller performance ratings is vital to maintain a healthy Amazon account. In our research we found merchants with products listed on the first page all have a 90% seller performance rating or above. According to Amazon, “All sellers should be working toward achieving and maintaining a level of customer service that meets the following seller performance targets”. Seller Performance Targets Pre-fulfilment cancellation rate: < 2.5% Late shipment rate: < 4% Order defect rate: < 1% Pre-fulfillment cancellation rate: This is the number of orders cancelled by a seller prior to shipment confirmation divided by the number of orders in the time period of interest. There could be a number of reasons as to why a seller canceled a shipment, from inadequate stock to unforeseen shipping costs & pricing errors. The most common reason for canceling an order is not having the inventory to ship. Having accurate stock levels in Amazon is tremendously important to maintaining good account health and obtaining positive customer feedback. Late shipment rate: This is the number of orders with shipments that are not confirmed by the expected ship date divided by the number of orders in the time period of interest. Orders with late shipment confirmations may lead to increased customer contacts and negatively impact customer experience. Keep in mind Amazon puts an enormous priority on fast, hassle-free shipping for their customers. If you are currently hand entering order information into your point of sale or ERP system you may make mistakes and data entry is very time consuming. You can easily automate your order fulfillment processes using Kosmos eSync to get your shipments out the...
Jan 7, 2015
Just about every business and consumer has experienced an issue with data synchronization. The latest issue with Amazon really caught my attention. On Friday Dec-12-2014, Amazon UK sellers experienced a pricing glitch that affected up to 75 million products. Items ranging from smartphones and tablets to mattresses and TV’s, all sold for a penny. Some Amazon sellers that were unable to cancel the orders in time lost their entire inventory. Since Amazon was fulfilling orders directly, the orders were picked, packed and shipped out by Amazon as soon as the orders were placed. The Amazon sellers that were affected used a 3rd party application to automatically sync and update prices in Amazon in order to maintain competitive prices. The sellers that used the centralized data management application called RepricerExpress have lost thousands and some now claim they face potential bankruptcy as a result of the error. If you store data in a centralized data management application you should be aware that data integrity issues can happen. Storing data in a middleware application with other businesses can potentially introduce cross-contamination issues when trying to sync data. For example, an online toy store could display camping and hunting gear for sale on their website as a result of cross-contamination issues when syncing data with a application that stores data from multiple business accounts. Below is a diagram that outlines how a typical centralized data management tool works when syncing data between applications. First a copy of the data is stored in the centralized application before the data is sent to its destinations. Just like introducing too many chefs in the kitchen,...
