CASE STUDIES

PO DATA RETRIEVAL

A client had data in BrightPearl where they created their purchase orders and had employees handle their suppliers. They needed a way to check in the products when they arrived at their dock, mark what was damaged or missing, and generate labels for sending the received products to Amazon using the FBA service. We created a custom tool that used the BrightPearl API to gather PO information and a webpage where these PO’s could be easily searched and the problem products marked and labels printed. This saved the company a great deal of time in their warehouse and helped avoid errors that were occurring when trying to copy the data manually. They were able to modify their warehouse processed to streamline it some in the process which meant handling the products fewer times.

SHIPMENT DESTINATION ORGANIZATION

A client wanted to separate products in their warehouse based on the location where the product was to be shipped. Amazon requires splitting shipments to different fulfillment centers, and their warehouse was set up that each production line would collect and process a shipment to a single fulfillment center. Amazon had made changes to the FBA process, so the client needed a way to determine where a product was going to go when they received it.

We created a special tool that would check with Amazon where the product might go. The destination would be printed on the FNSKU label and this allowed them to route the products to where they were likely going to go. Although this wasn’t 100% accurate, most of the time it was correct and allowed them to keep their current processes in place and speed up processing in their warehouse. They had 50 people already trained and working with their current process well, and so changing it and retraining these people would have been a much more costly proposition.

VELOCITY REPORT

Knowing how much product to send to Amazon is something every seller needs to know. If you don’t send enough, then you run out of stock. If you send too many, then you pay storage fees. The client was using some reports that Amazon has for this purpose, but they wanted to take into account many more variables than the standard on-hand inventory, in-transit, sellable, and sales over the last 30 days. They wanted to take into account lead-time from the supplier, ordered inventory that was on its way from the supplier, time it took Amazon to check in their products when using UPS or LTL, and other variables that Amazon doesn’t account for.

A velocity report tool was created for my website SellersToolbox which the client now has perpetual access. It allows for variations between suppliers of any length, variations in Amazon check-in times, sales history from 1 week to 1 year, purchase timeframe from 1 week to 1 year, and supplier filtering. It shows profitability and margin values based on cost, the number of days before the product will run out, the number of units and dollar amount that is an overage for slow-moving products, and more. They can now deal with foreign suppliers where it takes 2-3 months for products to arrive, as well as from a supplier that can deliver within 2-3 days. All of the data is downloadable to a spreadsheet for easier handling.

CASE-PACKED SUPPORT FOR FBA SHIPMENTS

A client using an FBA tool to create shipments wanted it to support case-packed items. We worked with both the client and the owner of the software to enhance the tool so it could support case-packed items when a shipment was created that way. This saved the client from having to find another tool to work with, possibly requiring them to change their business processes. The work also benefited the existing tool by making it more useful to other sellers.

SALES TAX DATA COLLECTION

A large company that handles sales tax data reporting had tried unsuccessfully to create a system that would pull in all of a seller’s Amazon sales tax data. We were contracted to create a system that would support 1000’s of sellers ensuring that the data was accurate, collected in a timely manner, and worked within Amazon’s guidelines and avoided throttling and other issues normally associated with using Amazon’s web services. The project has allowed the client to offer an Amazon collector to their clients and we are currently working with them on the collection of sales tax data with other marketplaces. We continue to work with this client by maintaining the software since Amazon frequently makes changes which must be dealt with to ensure the proper collecting of the sales tax information.