Etail Solutions Blog

If it isn’t getting seen, it isn’t getting sold. Experienced Amazon sellers know this hard truth: to get more sales, more buyers need to see your product in more listings. And creating those listings can be an expensive, time consuming and error-prone process.

"We had two-or-three fulltime people trying to match ASINs manually," said one Amazon top 500 seller. "When we brought in a new supplier that often meant 30-40,000 matches done by hand. It would take months."

With growth comes challenges. Managing inventory is one of them.

Inventory management is one of the most common reasons fast-growing sellers decide to replatform. The challenge of managing inventory across multiple suppliers, channels and listings is often too great for their current disparate systems. And the consequences of not mastering inventory management are high - including tying up capital in overstocks, losing sales in out-of-stocks, and even account suspension.

Repricing is the lifeblood of a successful Amazon business. And it's often the first part of the business to be automated - and eventually outgrown.

"About 90% of the time the merchant who wins the Buy Box gets the sale," said Michael Anderson, CEO and co-founder of Etail Solutions. "So sellers quickly realize how important it is to be priced competitively - and how impossible it is to do that without automation."

Onboarding a new supplier and selling their products for the first time carries inherent risk. They could have a track record of late shipments or items arriving defective or damaged - disruptions that will leave you with an influx of unfulfillable orders and put your Amazon account at risk of suspension. 

Some merchants have supplier catalogs with tens of thousands of UPCs. They don't know which items will sell and which ones won't, or if listings for them even exist. To find out, they have to manually match their UPCs to listings or use Amazon's Inventory Loader. The manual matching process requires too much time and isn't scalable. Amazon's Inventory Loader can only search for matches via UPC and it could match items to low-ranked, poorly managed listings since many ASINs have multiple UPC values. 

Let's face it, stockouts are every online seller's worst nightmare. They always result in lost sales, dissatisfied shoppers, and damage to your seller rating. What's worse, if someone wants to buy something that you don't have in stock, they'll probably go to one of your competitors.

Fortunately, there is a new tool you can use to prevent stockouts and overstocks. Inventory and FBA Replenishment lets you manage the delicate balance between supply and demand across complex multi-channel, multi-supplier environments. And today you can get the inside story on it from the expert who developed it. Below is the edited transcript of an interview with Clyde Seigle, Etail's CTO. In the interview Seigle explains what Inventory and FBA Replenishment is, how it works, and why it matters.

Not carrying enough high-demand stock costs you sales. Carrying too much low-demand stock ties up capital. Etail Solutions' newly released inventory and FBA replenishment feature solves this problem once and for all by calculating what, when, and how much to order - so you always have what your customers want and not what they don't.

You've been on Amazon for years, doing everything right - you think! Then you receive the following email: 

"We have removed your selling privileges, cancelled your listings, and placed a temporary hold on any funds in your seller account. We took these actions because you have listed items that are not permitted on Amazon.com."

Banned?! What the ...! You sell beauty items - things to make people look good! 

Unfortunately, this is not an isolated incident. Over the past year, hundreds of online merchants got the boot for offering restricted items on Amazon, mostly health and beauty products which contain specific outlawed ingredients.

The Etail Vantage Platform (EVP) is a multi-channel management platform with 7 core components, created to solve the real-world problems of mid-to-high volume online merchants. These core components consist of a wide range of features and functionalities that greatly enhance online multi-channel businesses, however, merchants rarely know about them until they start using EVP. They include: an enterprise class repricing engine, supplier scouting, advanced inventory functionality, like kits (bundles) and assembly items - to name just a few. Starting today, we will be devoting a blog post to each one of these robust tools so you can see how they work.