Are you struggling with high-volume Amazon orders?

Transalis is an Amazon commended EDI provider

There comes a point in every business’ evolution when you out-grow manual processes. Order volumes reach a point where admin is such a burden there seems little time or resources left for anything else.

Increasingly SME manufacturers are reaching critical mass when their Amazon Marketplace channels start to take off. At this point you are faced with two options – sink or swim.

Stick with inefficient paper, email and Excel processes or graduate to an automated solution that sets you free by seamlessly integrating with ERP and order management systems.

Perhaps the biggest challenge in this scenario is dealing with trading partners who use non-standardised forms and formats for sharing information about orders, invoices and shipping. Faced with this mix-and-match approach you’ll find yourself spending increasing amounts of time and money transferring information from one system and format to another, manually keying in order data and doing your best to avoid mistakes.

It doesn’t need to be like this, however. Savvy Amazon sellers are investing in electronic data interchange, (EDI) which exchanges digital documents seamlessly and automatically between trading partners.

An EDI solution will enable you to digitise and automate the flow of data and bypass the usual bottlenecks that can hold back an otherwise successful Amazon merchant. For example, Amazon order integration banishes the backlogs caused by manual data entry during peak trading. EDI takes all of this costly, time-consuming and error-prone manual labour off your hands. The result is the kind of end-to-end seamless communication that will take your business to a new level.

Efficient order management at scale isn’t the only challenge integrated EDI helps you overcome when selling through Amazon. Here are some of the main digital documents that Amazon works with. This shortlist shows just a handful of the scores of standardised Amazon EDI documents the online marketplace deals with:

• EDI 855 Order Confirmation
• EDI 856 Advance Shipment Notice
• EDI 810 Invoices to Customer
• EDI 753 Routing Request
• EDI 860 Order Change Notification

You can send and receive these Amazon trading documents without worrying that incorrect formatting will cause a missed payment, wrong date, incorrect amount, or other misinterpretation.

Read more: 6 reasons why every Amazon seller should invest in EDI

When it comes to inventory management, Amazon EDI integration speeds up data flows within your Amazon trading network, creating a real-time view of your available stock. Supply chain EDI enables you to spot stock-outs before they impact availability and this means there’s less reason to hold expensive excess stock in your warehouse.

Add integrated barcodes to each item of your stock and EDI will also enable you to create automatic shipping notifications as an order leaves a warehouse and then immediately change the order’s status in your system. This approach means you’ll know where any item is at any given moment.

Cloud-based EDI solutions can also help you raise your customer service levels. This is particularly important selling through Amazon because customer reviews and ratings have such a big impact on Amazon conversion rates.

Read more: What is EDI?

If you’re attempting to manually examine high volumes of orders, it can simply take too long to report issues to customers or respond to their complaints. But with an EDI for retail system in place, you have high-confidence data at your fingertips and won’t have to piece together potentially inaccurate information from multiple systems. In fact, you’ll experience far fewer customer service issues in the first place because EDI increases order accuracy and any issues that do arise will be easier to deal with.

Amazon Vendor Central EDI integration is compulsory if you are looking to sell your products in bulk to Amazon (known as an Amazon Vendor Central partnership). If you’re looking to sell direct to the consumer using the Amazon platform however, Amazon Seller Central EDI may not be a prerequisite… but for all the powerful reasons outlined above it would be a very costly mistake not to use the system.

You may also be interested in:

What to look out for when choosing a partner to connect to Amazon EDI

What are the benefits of EDI?

Getting started with EDI