Amazon Wholesale – Vendor Central
There are a number of ways to work with Amazon:
· Vendor Central
o Wholesale
o Drop Ship Vendor
· Seller Central
o Fulfilled by Amazon
o Fulfilled by Merchant
The focus of this article is selling on a Wholesale basis on Vendor Central.
To work with Amazon and not need to process orders in Vendor Central you can deploy the use of EDI or Electronic Data Interchange, however you need to consider the Amazon Service Level Agreement (SLA) plus the data that you might receive to support the order.
Orders
In my time I have seen instances where the article number assigned to your article is not what you see in the EDI Orders message.
Why is this an issue? When you send an order acknowledgment back to Amazon if you do not send the same article number the Amazon system will reject the order acknowledgment message. You therefore need to be able to process the order into your ERP system with the incorrect article number but then acknowledge the order using the incorrect article number found in the EDI order.
To solve this issue; I mapped both numbers into my system. The incorrect number found in LIN/C212/7140 is mapped into the ERP system twice. In the first instance the incorrect number found is edited to the correct article number and processed into the ERP system. To do this the assumption is that:
1. You validate the data being processed into your ERP system
2. Orders are rejected when data is not recognised
3. You are then able to edit the order file to correct the article number provided by Amazon
The second instance is mapped into a “spare field” as is. It is this field that is used when acknowledging the order. Amazon will therefor not reject the order acknowledgement as the article number will always be recognised.
I suggest that whenever an incorrect article number is received the article is never fulfilled as there will be continued issues wit the EDI Dispatch Advice Note (DESADV) and EDI INVOIC (Invoice).
The ERP will need to support the Amazon reason code 182 incorrect or inactive article code.
I appreciate that you are not fulfilling this part of the order, however by rejecting the article on the 182 you will not breach the Amazon SLA.
I have attached an example mapping document that supports the Amazon EDI Order below:
Amazon ORDERS Mapping Document
.xlsx
Download XLSX • 57KB
Order Acknowledgement
You will have to process the order in your ERP system. You can then acknowledge the order in Vendor Central. We all love a bit of rekeying and keying errors.
You can acknowledge the order in your ERP system and send out the EDI ORDACK (order acknowledgement) message remembering to send out the LIN/C212/7140 as received in the original order.
You will need to pay attention to:
1. LIN/1229 in which you are advising that the order has been accepted in full or changed.
2. QTY/C186/6063 in which advise the reason for any change applied to the order
I have attached an example mapping document that supports the Amazon EDI Order Acknowledgement below:
Amazon Order Acknowledgement (ORDRSP) Mapping Document
.xlsx
Download XLSX • 49KB
Dispatch Advice Note or DESADV
When I deployed Dispatch Advice I had delivered the SSCC (Serial Shipping Container Code) logic in the warehouse. This was a major change to the business processes within the warehouse operation as very article is tracked within delivery (Pallet/Carton).
I have attached an example mapping document that supports the Amazon EDI Dispatch Advice below:
Amazon DESADV Mapping Document
.xlsx
Download XLSX • 51KB
Invoice
Invoicing is straight forward remembering the HMRC rules regarding storage of the file received by Amazon, please refer to my blog: https://www.southwestdataintegration.co.uk/post/edi-invoicing
I have attached an example mapping document that supports the Amazon EDI Invoice below:
Amazon INVOIC Mapping Document
.xlsx
Download XLSX • 60KB
Conclusion
To achieve this build I have to acknowledge that I worked with Transalis (https://www.transalis.com/) to map the CSV files into the or out of the EDI formats shown in the attachments and support the AS2 connection.
However, these documents can be used if you are working with a slightly different format (XML, JSON etc.) or EDI managed Service Provider.
If you want to know more, please feel free to contact me. I have so much more to bring to the party:
Project Management
Business Analysis
Test Management
EDI knowledge and experience