How to Set Up EDI with Amazon Vendor Central?
EDI (Electronic Data Interchange) has been the most widely used means of doing business-to-business transactions. E-commerce data interchange (EDI) refers to the back-and-forth translation of data transmitted between two systems. EDI converts each exchange into a format that is understandable by the receiving system. A VAN (Value-Added Network), such as TrueCommerce, SPS Commerce, or B2BGateway, must be implemented by a vendor in order for EDI to function properly. A VAN helps a vendor to be EDI compliant by providing them with the necessary tools. Amazon does not compel sellers to be EDI compliant, however, the chance of surviving high demand or continuing a partnership with Amazon without EDI is slim to non-existence.
Amazon EDI makes it easy to automate purchase orders, invoicing, stock availability, and a variety of other processes. By devoting the necessary time to learning more about EDI while you evaluate an integration plan, you will equip your company with the resources it needs to be up – and – running as fast as feasible.
What is the benefit of integrating with Amazon Vendor?
If you’ve been an Amazon Vendor for just any length of time, you are likely to be familiar with the fact that the paperwork load may be substantial. Purchase orders are typically downloaded, processed, and accepted on Mondays and Wednesdays, putting a significant strain on the company’s resources.
Most businesses allocate one or two members of staff to processing purchase orders (POs) each morning, with a time commitment of 10-15 hours per week per account on average. Whereas this varies from manufacturer to manufacturer, any account with sales of more than $2 million per year will almost certainly have a substantial paper trail linked with them. In reality, even much smaller, expanding companies can feel the pinch of paperwork, and it is a facet of the Vendor program that is often neglected when a company first joins.
Integration is the solution for many people. It is suggested that you “get EDI” by Amazon, and the company encourages you to do so during many different training sessions. The phrases EDI and API are bandied about, and integration is referred to as the “done thing” in Amazon webinars, which we’ve all attended. As a matter of fact, Amazon has been recognized to provide incentives and account benefits to businesses that comply with their integration guidelines. Is EDI integration something that you should consider?
You must determine whether or not your present processes, which include people and papers, will be compatible with the volume of sales you expect to achieve in the upcoming quarters.
There have been cases where firms have concentrated solely on listing optimization & AcoS without considering the implications for their warehousing and financial operations. They also have a propensity to overlook some chargebacks and hidden expenses.
Such circumstances frequently result in lower profitability and higher extra expenditures. As a result, if you do not integrate your systems, your entire workflow will be slowed, and you will have to spend more money on manual labor and other methods of doing systematic processes.
EDI standards and protocols used by Amazon
Quite simply, Amazon Direct Fulfillment (also known as Amazon Dropshipping) is the procedure by which Amazon sells a product to a consumer and then passes the purchase history to a vendor or manufacturer to complete the fulfillment. This application has been used by thousands of merchants, so we felt it would be an excellent example to share with others. The detailed purchase flow, together with the appropriate EDI codes, is shown below.
First and foremost, in order to properly establish the EDI transaction, a vendor must go to their Amazon Vendor Central website and define the IDs that will be utilized in the transaction. The ISA (Interchange) and GS (Group) IDs are examples of such identifiers.
• Inventory Availability Advice (846) is sent by the seller to Amazon in order to signal inventory availability to Amazon.
• Amazon sends the vendor a Purchase Order (850) in response to their request.
• Through the use of Functional Acknowledgement, the vendor verifies and confirms the successful receipt of the communication (997)
• As soon as the Purchase Order has been entered into the vendor’s system, the vendor acknowledges the purchase order by sending a Purchase Order Acknowledgement email (855)
• When the order is ready to be dispatched, and Advanced Ship Notice (ASN) is issued to Amazon by the fulfillment center.
• Additionally, an invoice is produced and submitted to Amazon along with the Shipment ID (810)
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According to what you can see, the two organizations’ contacts are done through the use of an EDI feed, which allows them to communicate real-time inventory counts and other changes that are critical to preserving correct information about the transaction. Within EDI, there are a variety of standards that vary from area to region. Examples include the widespread usage of the X12 transaction standard in North America, while EDIFACT is universally recognized in European and Asian countries, as well as the United Kingdom.
Scalability is critical in the integration process
Whether your present procedures, which include people and paper, are capable of handling the number of sales that you expect to achieve in the next 12-24 months is something you must consider. When it comes to increasing sales, many individuals will focus on lowering their ACoS (advertising cost of sale) and optimizing their listings without considering the additional demands this would make on their administrative, warehousing, and financial departments.
Chargebacks and hidden expenses can sometimes rise to the point of making a business unprofitable therefore increasing sales do not always equate to greater profits if the business does not have precise and scalable systems in place. Unless you integrate your systems, you will experience bottlenecks in your operations and will be forced to recruit more staff members to handle order processing.
Having said that, integration is hardly a silver bullet. There are several restrictions, like the fact that you cannot build, upload, or change your catalog through integration and that you may only update product stock status once every 24 hours. Also to consider are how you handle stock and inventory on other sales channels, how strongly you want to prioritize Amazon in comparison to other sellers, and so forth.
Should you utilize an EDI system or an API system?
In the summer of 2020, Amazon Vendor introduced a new Vendor API that provided a lot of capabilities that were similar to the EDI connection. Vendor Central provides a fairly thorough analysis of the functional changes under the “Getting Started” tab, although in general, the differences are minor. EDI has a greater range of capabilities across the entire Vendor functionality, whereas the API gives extra access for Direct Fulfillment operations, among other things.
The true decision is more about what would work with your systems, how long it will take to set up, how much it will cost, and what your final goals are. For example, you could already have a B2B EDI supplier that can help you integrate Amazon Vendor, or you might already have an API in place and wish to use it for your Vendor integration.
Some businesses have systems that are only compatible with classic B2B EDI, but others have systems that are completely compatible with RESTful APIs.
According to our six guidelines for effective Amazon EDI integration, there are numerous considerations that must be taken into consideration. Before you begin, be sure you fully understand your own objectives and requirements. Decide on an EDI integration level that will make the achievement of those objectives as simple as feasible.
Spend some time getting to know the system. Make certain that you will receive the reports you require. In order to provide a smooth integration between orders and inventory management, you should.
When you put all of this together, you will have an Amazon EDI system that works as intended. It could save you both time and money if you include it.
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