Online stores vs goods suppliers: Who is to blame and what to do?

Anyone who is familiar with the e-commerce market from the inside knows that one of the most labor-intensive tasks for all of its participants is working with orders (accepting applications, reserving, etc.) that potential buyers leave. It’s too expensive for an absolute majority of online stores. It is believed that this problem is solved by the drop shipment model, in which the goods are sold immediately from the supplier’s warehouse, but not everything is so smooth here either.

Houston, we have a problem

In our time, usability and UX, many stores pay special attention to their appearance - they optimize pages, test hypotheses, in general, do everything to increase sales.
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But the cost of optimizing the site and even promotion can not be compared with the content of its own warehouse. It would seem, so what, you can act as a showcase, take an order from a client, and transfer information about it further directly to the supplier, who will ship the conditional TV or refrigerator on his own.

But, is this model convenient to the suppliers of the goods? According to our research, there are three main difficulties of a supplier with online stores:



As a result, only a little more than a third of all possible suppliers work with the Internet - just imagine, the abundance of goods on the shelves of virtual stores and the level of competition that could be:



Why is this happening? In this situation, it is suppliers who are most guilty, many of whom are still in the deep 90s in their mentality and, consequently, the technical level. Very often, when negotiating with a new supplier, representatives of online stores hear such words as “price list in XLS”, “minimum batch - 50 thousand rubles”, “we do not have a full catalog on the site, call better” and stuff like that.

The impact of situations when the fault of the insufficient technological level of the supplier, the site status window cannot show the current status of product availability, obviously - this entails a whole bunch of problems, ranging from reputational losses, when a customer orders something that is out of stock, ending with useless spending advertising budgets on advertisements for currently missing products.

Automating interactions with suppliers is quite difficult. First, if the store is large enough, then there are several suppliers, and it is very difficult and expensive to engage in the automation of communication with each of them. With 100% probability, automation will come down to the fact that suppliers will send to the store an Excel file with balances for each product (each in its own format), which somehow needs to be parsed and loaded into the admin panel.

This is an extremely time-consuming scheme, which, moreover, due to the fact that the supplier will not always correctly provide correct data on the residuals, so the problem with advertising of missing goods will not be solved in any way.

What other options are there?

EDI Standards

Electronic Data Interchange or Electronic Data Interchange is a series of standards for the transmission of digital information. The main advantage of EDI for communications is the structured information. Obviously, a situation is more profitable for a business when all participants in the business chain understand the processes that are taking place, which is rather difficult to achieve, when communicating by e-mail - the letter can always be interpreted incorrectly, etc. EDI standards many would very much like to use in e-commerce.

The case of EDI can be described as:

1. The order information is stored in 1C, from where the necessary data can be extracted and converted to a file for the EDI translation program.
2. The EDI translator checks the resulting file for compliance with the standards, after which the message itself is translated into the EDI format.
3. Next, a communication connection is established for the transfer of EDI - the so-called purchase order.
4. The file is sent to the mailbox either to FTP or directly to the recipient via HTTP.
5. The program that receives the purchase order formats the incoming information and translates it into files of existing applications. purchase order via EDI, can be converted and loaded into a special order registration module.

[Read more here ].



Total, positive aspects of EDI:

• Increased accuracy of information.
• The possibility of reducing labor costs (eg manual input).
• Speed ​​- thanks to fast data transfer, the time for negotiations with suppliers is reduced.
• Cost reduction
• Save postage.
• Waste paper documents.

Unfortunately, the reality is that the likelihood that in the current form of EDI will work in e-commerce is small. There are several reasons for this:

1. Most players lack data systematization.
2. There are no unique attributes of goods that could be used to sort and organize information.
3. EDI does not transmit content data.

The question arises, if EDI does not fit, then how to automate the communication of online stores with suppliers of goods and streamline it?

B2B systems

By the way, not everything is so bad on the ecommerce market, because suppliers and online stores are not the only participants. There are special b2b digital distribution systems that help solve problems in the communications of suppliers and stores.

Such systems allow you to reserve goods in warehouses via the Internet, see warehouse balances from 1C, form various orders and work with documentation. The Internet distribution system works complete with a gateway for exchanging data between the b2b system and accounting databases like 1C.

Providers of Internet distribution systems connect suppliers that meet the necessary criteria (website, presence of certain brands, volume of product matrix, etc.) to a single database, and online stores get a web interface and API for accessing data. The process of booking orders can also be automated, with the ability for online stores to automatically change the display of goods on the storefront, depending on the balance of the online store. Accordingly, suppliers on their website place a personal account for partners (ie, online stores) that interact with the system through it.

The availability of the b2b system significantly reduces the order processing time - in the case of the Agora Optima system, from 17 minutes to 3 minutes. If the supplier has installed such a system, he can receive up to 21% of all orders through it, however, at the moment only about two percent of suppliers use b2b systems.



A separate advantage of such systems can be called their possible implementation in a certain constructor, which can be “assembled” into a finished product with the help of various modules. As a result, for the majority of participants in the ecommerce market, such services allow you to simplify interaction and reduce the cost of storage and advertising.

Little about the future

Obviously, the e-commerce market in Russia is waiting for another round of development, which will be characterized by the automation of data transfer, the emergence of high-load content transfer services, and standardization of the transfer of documents for e-commerce.

Standardizing the work of suppliers with online stores, if you will, the birth of the EDI 2.0 standard, will certainly create new opportunities for the growth of the e-commerce market.