With close to a 100 million active buyer accounts, Amazon is arguably the biggest market places in the world- both online and offline. So it’s no surprise when we see over 1.5 million seller accounts on Amazon. Some of these sellers sell exclusively on Amazon while many others sell on Amazon in addition to their webstores. Doing so have several benefits- attracting new customers, driving more volume and others.
However, the addtional sales channel does introduce additional complexities in inventory and order management. The seller now has to manage downloading, fulfillment and shipping of orders from two or more places. Then the seller needs to ensure the inventories advertised on their webstore and Amazon are accurate. Further, to ensure customer satisfaction, the seller has to manually go into Amazon and updated the status of each order so the customer may get uptodate information on what is happening to their orders.
Sellers need to make sure that their order/inventory management processes and systems adapt to support this new sales channel. If not, they risk driving away potential customers and affecting their seller rating on Amazon. Buyers on Amazon can be unforgiving if the seller is out of stock on items that were sold.