Maximize Your Online Marketplace and Storefront
Amazon is so tied to eCommerce that every retailer who sells online has had to figure out how to navigate its shadow. Even if you still use brick-and-mortar locations, your storefront website is always going to be competing with Amazon.com, and it is ideally better to work with them than against them. However, a lawsuit brought by the Federal Trade Commission – and attorneys general from 17 states – could change the status quo and present new challenges, or possibly new opportunities who some online sellers.
FTC Antitrust Lawsuit Against Amazon
The FTC’s lawsuit against Amazon centers around Amazon’s role as a hub for eCommerce, alleging that the company leverages monopolist powers to impede current competitors from growing and new competitors from emerging. Per the suit, these include “[a]nti-discounting measures that punish sellers and deter other online retailers from offering prices lower than Amazon, keeping prices higher for products across the internet.” The suit also accuses Amazon.com of forcing sellers to use Prime and its “costly fulfillment service” to nudge them towards inflated pricing.
This lawsuit could complicate the challenges eCommerce retailers have with Amazon, which provides access to a wide audience as well as market-leading features for buyers to find, order and receive products. At the same time, the margins from selling on Amazon are severely lower than selling directly.
Yet few online retailers can recreate what Amazon does on their own and often face a tough choice: A) sell more and gain more visibility while earning less profit through the Amazon marketplace, or B) sell less and gain less visibility, but generate higher profit by going direct to the customer.
Navigating eCommerce in 2024 With or Without Amazon
The good news is that your eCommerce business can find success with either choice – and taking advantage of the right solutions and services to build and maintain your digital storefront can help tremendously.
SWK Technologies works with numerous customers to help them navigate the logistics of the online selling world, and from our conversations we found that businesses achieve the most success when they diversify their online portfolio. Amazon and other marketplaces like Target+ and eBay give you additional channels to work with on top of your own website, which ensures that you do not have to be overly reliant on one point of failure for your entire eCommerce business. Having multiple income streams does not hurt either, and with the Internet those streams can be turned into rivers.
However, the challenge is that not everyone has the time or resources to manage all these moving pieces – which is where technology comes in. Your software stack will play a big role in selling online either with or without Amazon, depending on which systems you choose. Above all, we recommend choosing applications that play well with each other, as seamless integration is integral to not only saving yourself headaches but also for keeping your customers engaged in your front-end shopping cart. When done right, each connected app should be able to share data – and even functionality – seamlessly, keeping your customer journey running without hiccups.
Here are the top solutions we suggest you get started with:
eCommerce Software
Every online seller’s journey starts with choosing how to build your digital channel, whether you create a website from scratch and handle sales manually, or decide to automate the process to make it easier. The right eCommerce solution makes a world of difference and is your gateway to building and maintaining your web storefront. Even when selling through Amazon, it is imperative to have a system that gives you visibility into your value chain and feeds you data on key metrics, as well as connects to every piece of your tech stack.
The trick when selecting the best software for eCommerce is integration – it needs to plug in with Amazon.com APIs for payments, fulfillment and more. It should also connect with your CMS (content management system), such as WordPress, Wix, etc., for your website, along with your applications for inventory management, bookkeeping, shipping, email communications and any other service you need to make your business run. Even without Amazon, your retail systems should have native integrations for these apps as well as any other marketplaces you could take advantage of, like Walmart, Target, and Etsy, ensuring that you have brand coverage throughout the market. With all this mind, your eCommerce solution must also help you handle all this different technology and prevent silos from blocking your visibility into your business operations and finances.
When surveyed during a past SWK webinar, many attendees highlighted integrating their omnichannel solution with their ERP as their biggest challenge, as can be seen in Figure A below. This reflects just how big of an obstacle lacking a reliable connector between both these applications becomes, even worse for most than clicking through spreadsheets or cramming more tasks into a busy day. Ensuring that data synchronizes seamlessly between each system should be a top priority when building your software stack, and you must look at an ERP that fulfills this need.
ERP and Accounting Software
Accounting software may be low on many lists for retail software priorities, but many do not realize how big a gap this could leave. Even more important than ensuring your bookkeeping complies with reporting regulations, you need to have a central repository for the entirety of your data. This is why an ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) system is ideal for being the cornerstone of your application stack, where it can record and process everything from inventory tracking to financials.
When selling through Amazon, the same approach for choosing an eCommerce solution applies when looking at enterprise accounting software – prioritize Amazon.com API integration. It does not hurt if your ERP also plays well with everything else in your retail IT stack to ensure seamless data flow and less headaches overall, especially for key activities in your supply chain or shopping cart like warehouse management, POS (point-of-sale) or shipping. Consequently, you should narrow down your selection to solutions that are SaaS or at least built from a cloud platform, as web-based systems are better equipped than legacy on-premise apps to connect seamlessly with other databases.
Sales Tax Software
Whether you sell through Amazon or on your own, for eCommerce retailers sales and use tax collection is an ever-present regulation. There are important steps to remember when using either channel as well as distinctions between the two on your side. In addition to economic nexus laws, as a marketplace facilitator Amazon.com has additional requirements to follow for taxation on top of geographic considerations for fulfillment locations – this is why it is vital to have a sales tax solution that tracks these stipulations automatically.
Whether selling with Amazon or not, it is important that your business stays on top of your tax nexus. Obviously, any sales and use tax automation system you choose should be able to integrate with Amazon.com’s APIs, as well as those of your eCommerce solution and your ERP or accounting software. What matters most, however, is how well all of your solutions play together to ensure you do not have to manually validate and apply sales tax to each order, reducing the risk of mistakes and the IRS knocking on your door.
Integrating eCommerce with ERP and Sales Tax Automation
SWK has worked with many customers in the distribution industry and specifically in the online retail space, and these are the solutions we recommend for navigating ecommerce either with or without Amazon:
BigCommerce
BigCommerce is a market-leading eCommerce solution that has helped empower tens of thousands of digital storefronts in over 120 countries. Tailored for scalability, BigCommerce stands out for both robust features and a long list of available integrations, the latter of which includes Amazon and other marketplaces. There are also native connectors with popular third-party apps like MailChimp, Bloomreach and ShipStation to ensure that you are able to build the retail technology stack that works best for you.
Some examples of BigCommerce’s capabilities include:
- Channel Manager – Channel Manager lets you consolidate and manage your various online sales channels in one place, including any marketplace storefronts such as Amazon, Facebook or Walmart
- Multi-Storefront (MSF) – MSF allows you to manage multiple storefronts from your original portal, with each additional storefront able to have its own unique domain, theme, etc.
- SEO Tools – Native tools and automated settings that streamline search engine optimization for your storefront website, including quick robots.txt controls, a CDN for faster file loading and adjustable fields for metatags
Feedonomics
Feedonomics is a data feed management tool that automates your product listing processes, helping you populate information for each listing with limited manual input and optimize how data is handled for each channel. Working with an eCommerce solution like BigCommerce, Feedonomics integrates seamlessly with both your own website and marketplace storefronts such as Amazon, Target, and eBay.
Acumatica Cloud ERP
Acumatica is a modern cloud ERP that goes beyond traditional accounting software and delivers a streamlined user experience designed to be intuitive for people. With an advanced platform, scalable pricing, a robust marketplace of third-party connectors and modules for every business case needed from financials and business intelligence (BI) to CRM and Point-of-Sale (POS), Acumatica is built as an enterprise system that empowers growth from the bottom up.
The Acumatica Retail Edition acts as the anchor for your retail technology stack, connecting financial, distribution, shipping, customer management and reporting processes together and synchronizing data with your eCommerce software. With native integrations available for BigCommerce, Shopify, SPS Commerce and more, Acumatica’s solution for online and omnichannel sellers is built to help you scale no matter whether you are in B2C, B2B or D2C sales.
Avalara
Avalara is a premier sales tax automation solution that takes the pain out of identifying, certifying, applying, and reporting on taxation requirements for economic nexus for eCommerce retailers. With a vast database of different tax nexus regulations for every U.S. state as well as for marketplace facilitators like Amazon and eBay, Avalara’s the go-to tax compliance system for thousands of online sellers.
Acumatica ERP Integration with BigCommerce and Avalara
There are two important factors to consider for the above three solutions:
- They are leaders in their respective software markets
- They are built to integrate with different application APIs, including with each other and Amazon
Even better for point #2, all feature native connectors with each other and Amazon.com, allowing data to be transferred seamlessly for your technology stack. There are different ways you can leverage this close level of integration depending on whether you are using Amazon’s storefront or your own.
When using Amazon:
- BigCommerce manages your storefronts and channels from a central portal, letting you sync data from your eCommerce solution as well as other apps with Amazon’s shopping cart.
- Feedonomics for Marketplaces tailors your product listings for Amazon.com compliance and feeds the data from BigCommerce into your storefront and shopping cart.
- Acumatica syncs financial and order data between your other solutions, giving you end-to-end value chain visibility from your inventory to your storefront.
- Avalara integrates directly with Amazon.com orders and has automated calculation processes for applying sales tax requirements specific to the marketplace, ensuring compliance with various economic nexus regulations.
When selling without Amazon:
- BigCommerce helps you build and manage your website(s) with as many storefronts as you need, as well as bridge data shared between the rest of your tech stack and other marketplace channels besides Amazon.com, such as Target+.
- Feedonomics synchronizes data for listed products across all channels and optimizes it for each storefront, whether a product is listed on your own website(s) or is being fed into a marketplace listing through API integration.
- Acumatica will take on a more central role as your ERP, holding onto the “crown jewels” of data and helping you manage the operational components as well as financial, inventory and order management.
- Avalara will maintain its automated process for certification and calculations of sales and use tax and apply the proper rates for each order that is passed through your eCommerce and ERP systems.
An eCommerce Integration Partner You Can Trust
Navigating the world of online retail in the age of Amazon – lawsuit or no lawsuit – is tough, but SWK Technologies is here to provide you with the solutions and expertise you need to stand out in the eCommerce market. We will help you design and build a tech stack that streamlines how you sell to your customers and automates operational hurdles that would slow you down.
Contact SWK today to learn more about optimizing your retail technology and see how to position your eCommerce operations for success with seamless integration.
Learn More About eCommerce With or Without Amazon