If you didn’t have a chance to attend our webinar with Magento, here is an overview of what happened. We had close to 200 attendees to the webinar hosted by our strategic partner Magento, one of the industry leaders of eCommerce software and platform.
The subject for the webinar was EDI Made Easy: Leveraging your Magento site for drop ship success. We started the webinar off by giving an overview of the eCommerce ecosystem – touching on marketplaces, trading partners, order management systems, ERP, and shopping carts. This gave the attendees a great understanding of the complexity of today’s market. We then dived into the main subject of the webinar, drop shipping. For those of you who don’t know, drop shipping is a supply chain management technique in which the retailers do not keep goods in stock, but instead transfer customer orders and shipment details to either manufacturers or wholesalers, who then ship the goods directly to the customers. Drop shipping is great for retailers because it can reduce costs associated with carrying inventory and eliminate substantial overhead. It is also great for the supplier because it gives them more exposure and opportunity by working with many different retail customers. The downside of drop shipping for suppliers and retailers is the headache associated with how to get the information in/out of internal systems such as Magento eCommerce platform and to different trading partners via EDI, XML, or flat files. Even if you have some type of EDI solution right now it is probably not all automated. You keep processing data manually and enter them in different systems several times.
Retailers who are drop shipping through their suppliers network usually send their POs (Purchase Order, EDI 850) from there online shopping cart via email, EDI, XML, or flat file. The suppliers must then manually process the orders into their internal systems by uploading or inputting the items. Once the order is picked and packed, the supplier will send the ASN (Advance Shipment Notice EDI 856), PO Ack (Purchase Order Acknowledgement, EDI 855), Invoice (EDI 810), or all of them to the retailer via email, EDI, XML, flat file or email. It can be a headache for retailers to process these orders and keep track of them if they are coming in all different types of formats. It becomes time consuming and costly. In our presentation, we felt it was important to show all the steps and manual processes that take place during a typical drop ship order life cycle Look for the second part of our experience later this this week. In part 2, we will go over the second half of the webinar and how to automate these processes using solutions such as logicbroker.
