Welcome back. In this video I’ll be talking about marketplace APIs and how their use can have major benefits for your business.
We’re all familiar with on-line marketplaces like Amazon, eBay and so on. All of the good ones provide an API that allows their sellers to automate key functions, such as retrieving orders, marking orders as shipped and providing tracking information. They can also be used to manage your product listings in an automated way.
When combined with the API for your ERP system, it becomes possible to fully automate the business conducted via the marketplaces and avoid endless hours handling orders manually.
The marketplaces that are known to provide such APIs include Amazon, eBay, Etsy, OnBuy.com, emag, Google Shopping, Allegro, bonanza and newegg with loads more in the pipeline.
The process looks like this.
Orders are collected by ZEDI, using the API for your chosen marketplace.
It then maps them into the format that your ERP’s API requires.
The orders are then delivered directly into the ERP.
Any errors are immediately reported to the people who can deal with the issue.
Amazon has two APIs called MWS and SP-API.
MWS is the older of the two and will be decommissioned in stages starting 31st-August 2023. For this reason, we don’t use it and focus on the SP-API which is replacing it.
Any businesses that currently use the MWS API are strongly advised to migrate to SP-API as soon as possible, but this presents a particular challenge for FBM sellers.
FBM stands for fulfilled by merchant and refers to the process by which a seller retrieves orders from Amazon, and then delivers the goods to the consumer.
The other option is FBA, fulfilled by Amazon, where the supplier’s stock is stored in an Amazon Warehouse, and Amazon is responsible for picking and shipping the goods to the consumer.
If you are a an FBM seller then to deliver the goods, it stands to reason that you’ll need to know the full delivery name and address of the consumer who has purchased them. With MWS this wasn’t an issue but when SP-API was developed, Amazon quite rightly implemented a number of safeguards to protect personally identifiable information.
By default, when you download FBM orders from Amazon using the SP-API, it will only include the last two lines of the delivery address. This means you wouldn’t get enough information to fulfil the order.
The full address is visible if you view the order via Amazon.com, it’s just not provided when you retrieve the order via the SP-API.
It is technically possible to get the full name and address via the SP-API providing the software uses a thing called a restricted data token, or RDT for short. Unfortunately getting an RDT is not easy, if you were to apply for one you would need to convince Amazon that your IT infrastructure satisfies a number of very demanding security requirements, several of which are beyond the means of all but the largest companies.
So, as an FBM seller you’ll either need to obtain the address information by viewing each order on amazon.com and transcribing it into your ERP system, or retrieve the order information in some other way.
ZirconBlue has a relationship with a specialist API company who’s systems are able to retrieve full address details from Amazon. They have also implemented API connections to 118 other marketplaces, with more to come.
This means that you could use ZEDI as a way of ensuring that your business will not be adversely impacted when Amazon decommissions the old MWS API.
Even if you don’t trade via Amazon, this capability gives your business a huge range of options to automate the business conducted using your existing marketplaces, and easily expand into others as and when they’re required.