ECommerce Inventory Management — Vendor Portals

Within vendor portals, one of the most important things from a seller's perspective is the ability to update the status of inventory and pricing data. It needs to be kept accurate so that when a buyer is looking for something, they can find what they are looking for and make an informed decision about whether or not to purchase. One of the first things buyers look at is whether the item is actually in stock with this seller. And two, is it correctly priced based on possible changes in the economic situation.

It's possible that gas prices can be changing, transport, other prices of materials that are there going into the finished goods, etc. Therefore, the seller really needs to have control and the ability to update in bulk, and propagate changes down in bulk, either via a mass upload or using the APIs for their specific vendor. APIs so they can push and pull data for their inventory and pricing data into the marketplace in a secure and very restrictive manner to just their account.

Control over the interaction with price and inventory data specific to their offerings is extremely valuable. Often this will include multiple locations for fulfillment, the associated shipping, and potentially customs and duties data if there are overseas fulfillment locations or cross-country transportation. Typically, there are also tax implications as well. We need to be able to identify all of these.

eCommerce Warehouse Management

One of the things that's really challenging about the inventory and pricing data is a lot of times if there are multiple warehouses and multiple fulfillment locations and we're operating at scale, we've got to enable the vendors to update this information pretty rapidly, and with this standard format, so we do leverage EDI in eCommerce, or electronic data interchange. We have the ability to take advantage of standard EDI formats for vendors as well as a PunchOut Catalog solution and CXML formats.

EDI format is really powerful for multilocation inventory and pricing data, as well as dealing with customer-specific pricing—we’ll want to leverage this bulk import capability for most vendors. But in a lot of cases the pricing and inventory information won't change too much and depending on the sellers, there isn't going to be a huge issue.

We also autodecrement the inventory data within the eCommerce platform once we receive it based on orders that come in. Therefore, we are already accounting for the specific location purchases based on where we're expecting them fulfill from and managing the actual inventory data for the vendor as purchases are made.

In addition to inventory and pricing management, one of the other key aspects of the vendor portal or the seller portal, is being able to review reporting and analytics on their performance, as well the performance of advertising, which we talk about in this in this article on eCommerce marketplace advertising and analytics features.

To briefly go over that, though, the reporting and analytics is a really powerful capability because the vendor has access to the marketplace, and they can see what their competitors are doing and what's going on in the marketplace.

Vendor Reports

We provide reports that basically anonymize and normalize the data so that they can see within their industry and categories that they're advertising in that they care about where they sit, as far as average price, reviews, rating, and sales volume.

Some of this depends on what you want to show to your vendors, but we want to enable the vendors to press and compete and work so that they are offering, within reason, the lowest cost possible and the highest value to the buyers. The more buyers getting better deals and better values, and a consistent experience that’s very positive, the more they're going to keep coming back and spread the word.

Therefore, with our reporting, we want to encourage the vendors to operate to further improve and move up the spectrum as far as their performance and in all of those categories and any others that makes sense for us to report on. We also show traditional reports like sales, total sales, sales by region, sales by category, sales of products of a certain type, and fulfillment status—so the orders, order status, fulfillment, and any issues reported that need to be resolved, or products that need to be escalated with a return or damage, for example. We also show reporting on the ratings and reviews and any kind of chats or email notifications so that we can make sure that the vendors are responsive and interacting with the buyers.

Then, we also have analytics data. Within the eCommerce platform itself we have a native tracking and analytics platform that can determine what the user data is like. We use this to feed back into our search results and into our recommendations and other aspects of abandoned cart and other functionalities within the platform.

One of the other key aspects of the analytics is being able to share with vendors what their click through rates are, what their traffic is to their particular product details and products, if there's a high bounce rate, etc. And then providing recommendations like recommending an optimization to the imagery, recommending optimization to certain content, and giving guidelines. This idea of governance and essentially guide rails to their experience and how they're setting up their content.

In some cases, we can even do things like giving a red, yellow, green type of a rating based on what we're seeing in certain fields, as far as field length, number of images, etc. It’s essentially a light gamification of the process for vendors based on their analytics data.

We're also able to determine how many items are added to the cart versus actually paid for, which items are selling the most, which items have the highest margin, etc. If they want to input their actual cost data, we can share that as well, and many more features. The reporting tool also has the ability to allow users to build custom reports, so if desired we can enable that.

Most of the time it can be overwhelming to a vendor to have too many options in front of them, so we recommend keeping this pretty isolated, but if there's a need to provide custom reporting, that's definitely an option. These are all features that are really important for scaling and ramping up a vendor experience and enabling them to see and gain a pulse on what's going on within their particular portal and with their items within the marketplace.

The other thing that can be really helpful about a vendor dashboard and reporting is the ability to have sparklines and visuals, graphs and charts that are very intuitive and be able to show at a glance what the trends are and provide visual cues to vendors who are traditionally quite busy. And if we have this very intuitive interaction with them, they're going to tend more toward getting the right things done. If we encourage them with the right guidelines, they’ll have better behavior that will benefit the entire marketplace as well as that particular vender.

Additional Resources for e-Marketplace

• Key Marketplace Considerations
• Filtering and Categorization of Products
• Content Sourcing Practices & Workflows
• Best Buyer Dashboard Features
• Best Cart Features & Workflows
• EDI eCommerce
• Best Checkout Workflows & Payment Methods
• Establishing an eMarket - Vendor Portals
• eMarket Success - Vendor Portals
• PunchOut Catalog
• eMarket Line of Business Integrations – Vendor Portals
• eCommerce Inventory Management – Vendor Portals