App reviews, troubleshooting, and recommendations
What happened to the old Amazon channel? Amazon fee's are expensive enough as it is and now to have to move to the Codisto Amazon version is killing us not only in cost but lag as well. What used to be a simple upload to Amazon and click the channel on Shopify is now a good 5 minute process per item and then sit and wait... I uploaded a few items the other day and it took almost an hour to sync up. I also have a brick and mortar shop and in that time we sold 3 products in shop that were accounted for on the Shopify side, but not accounted for on Amazon due to the sync time. This happened twice. So now I get a message from Amazon saying my account is in danger of being suspended because we've had to cancel 6 out of 74 orders in 2 days.
Seriously frustrated.
If you're fulfilling orders from Shopify on Amazon (in US or Canada marketplace), another option you have is to use the Amazon FBA fulfillment service, that is still in operation: https://help.shopify.com/en/manual/shipping/fulfillment-services/amazon
This is a common workflow:
1) Upload products to Amazon via spreadsheet (Inventory upload in Amazon), so they're in Amazon's system (plus you can tailor the listing on Amazon).
2) Use Shopify's amazon fulfillment service to sync inventory with Shopify products that are stored / fulfilled by Amazon
3) When orders come in, request fulfillment to Amazon, then when Amazon ships them they send back the tracking to Shopify
Note: I also use the Codisto app but for different purpose, for importing Amazon FBM orders to Shopify. I think it's a good app, I haven't used it for inventory syncing but it sounds like it just takes some time for the sync to happen.
I appreciate that, but we are not using the FBA service. We are selling Funko Pops and the margins are pretty slim.
The syncing, in my case, between both systems is 30 min to an hour. The past week, when we put a couple of new release Funko Pops on Amazon, we sold through 36-48 items in 2 days. This is while people are also buying them in store. I have a full time employee pulling and packing items that are sold online, but with the sync delay we oversold by 6 items.
Ahh, I see, that's a tough one because you'd need to ping the Amazon API every time inventory changes on Shopify. With a private app it would be no problem but I think the challenge comes from using a public app where you're processing thousands of requests per second.... maybe that's why Shopify canned the Amazon sales channel, being an app developer I can imagine that being a big server / maintenance bill.
In this case, it might be best to stop selling off-Amazon when inventory reaches less than a certain amount (you could either set up an inventory alert, or if in-store you check the website for inventory, you could add a bit of code to say "out of stock" on the website when inventory is under a certain level (like less than 10 units, make it not available).
Or as a temp fix, I might just allocate inventory separately for Amazon and in-store. Better to be out of stock somewhere than risk bad reviews.
I've sold on Amazon and I know they're pretty hardcore about fulfilling orders you promise, so I feel your pain here. Good luck with this, I hope you find a good solution.
Did you try other options for Amazon integration?
From our experience amazon, could works a bit slowly of processing product exports. Especially this happens with a high traffic time. On our internal monitoring, we can see that sometimes for a ~10 listings we didn't receive a "success" response from amazon for more than 15 minutes.
But downloading orders is a bit different task and it could be obtained almost instantly after purchase happens. Based on Amazon recommendation we fetch it every 5 minutes and try to push then to the Shopify store.
We published a huge article recently in our blog, in the almost very end you can find part especially connected to Shopify — https://medium.com/@salestio/processing-amazon-orders-in-shopify-store-304ded22dcdb
Maybe this will be interesting for you. And please let me know if you are interested to give our app a test drive. We are relatively small and try to find an individual approach to each of our clients.
Regards,
Alex
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