ChannelAdvisor Integration
Any kind of ChannelAdvisor usage cases.
ChannelAdvisor is an e-commerce management system for online retailers. It allows to manage single database of products and synchronize this database to different on-line marketplaces like eBay, Amazon, Rakuten.com, Jet.com, Tmall.com and many others. Our company develops complex solutions in the field of automation of business processes for online stores. It's no secret that over the last few years, the business of online stores has changed a lot compared to past. More recently, it was enough just to open a simple Internet website, and you could accept orders from customers who were simply interested in making their first orders via Internet.
However, today the situation has drastically changed. It is not enough just to open a simple online store. Today when there are thousands of such online stores, the competition is high both from small businesses and from big players. Customers have become more sophisticated, demanding for speed of service and delivery, quality of service. How can you develop your online store in a highly competitive and demanding environment? The solution lies in the constant modernization of the business - to be ahead of competitors, to meet the requirements of customers, to introduce new technologies into your business.
We offer you our experience in this difficult process. One of the directions of our work is the automation of online stores. How can you achieve a qualitative leap forward? Sometimes existing methods of work simply hamper the whole process. For example, you have a goods warehouse database. Of course, you carefully manually entered all the characteristics of the goods into the warehouse accounting system, checked all prices, photos of items, descriptions, models and variations. How long did it take? Long enough... But now you need, say, to check the database for the presence of duplicates of goods. Doing this task manually is rather difficult and time-consuming when there is a database of even several thousand products. Here the automation comes to the rescue! We can make a software application that will search the database and find duplicate products according to the specified criteria, generate a report on duplicates, sending it to e-mail. All tasks are performed in the background on the server, not on your computer. So simple and easily? Really!
Alternatively, maybe you decided to put all the goods on an external trading platform, say eBay. Expanding, updating prices and listings, working with auctions and advertising - even with a warehouse of several hundred products with varieties - turns into a nightmare. Of course, you can hire a person so that he/she will do this job singly, but if there are so little profit? Here the automation comes to the rescue! Many trading platforms, such as Amazon, eBay have their own interface for automating work with goods. We have experience developing product database synchronization applications which sync databases between your database and the listing of Amazon, eBay. Let the computer cope with the task of publishing the goods, by the means of our solution. Moreover, you will get a pleasant savings, because the work done by a computer is much cheaper than the same work performed by a worker. You can publish the products faster than your competitors, and this means achieving more audience outreach and as a consequence - to increase the number of orders. This is an evident competitive advantage.
Our company has developed an automated system of processing the warehouse stock database. As a product database and an intermediary for integration with online sites, the ChannelAdvisor platform was used.
The successful integration solution highlights are:
- Checking and reporting redundant ChannelAdvisor duplicates
- Processing all items in ChannelAdvisor database and change items attributes based on specified criteria
- Populating ChannelAdvisor database with items created by predefined template
- Batch processing of inventory lists and sycnhronizing with CA database
- Implementing both web-interface for softwares and background schedulres
- Overcoming CA API limitations
The distinctive features of the system are briefly considered:
Initially, the system worked with a small products database - 10000 pcs. However, as the warehouse grew, it became necessary to speed up the system operation at large volumes of the warehouse - 200,000 products including their varieties. We coped with the task of increasing the database of goods by reducing memory consumption, processor time, optimizing algorithms.
We wanted to create a universal batch handler for items to provide, the system’s flexibility and extensibility for the future.
The batch processor works according to the rules. Each rule consists of a filter and a list of actions to perform. The filter is a branched structure of conditions, through which the desired products are selected according to specified characteristics. It is also possible to combine a variety of conditions in order to make the search criteria more accurate, if necessary. The action list complements the process of automating the rule and represents the actions that must be performed on the goods. It is possible to change the properties of goods in accordance with the specified rule. Not only changes to fixed values are supported, but also the creation of dynamic values that are programmed depending on the values of other attributes.
For example: For the Christmas sale, you need to find all the products, the price of which is less than $50 add them to the "Promotional Products" section, set an auction price for them equal to retail price minus 10% and create advertising for them on eBay.
Such and similar automation tasks are successfully solved by our company, we do have experience in solving them. We can not only bring you one of the pre-made solutions that we have, but also to tell you what solutions will work for you and make a unique advanced turnkey solution that is aimed specifically at resolving your problems.