FTP to eBay, Amazon, Magento etc
Discussion
Hi everyone,
Hope you are well and safe in these uncharted times.
I have about 850 imported products in my own label that some of my customers are selling online via the usual platforms eBay, Amazon etc and I want to offer a solution that helps them use all my data, descriptions/photography that my colleagues write/shoot and crucially the live stock information that is currently being churned our of my system real time for them to effectively list my whole or a portion of my product range that they see fit.
In conversation with one of my customers he has told me that he is using Linnworks and I am aware of systems like Channel Advisor.
Effectively I want a solution that can provide the data to an experienced e-commerce retailer that could say from day one list 200 products and then give me daily orders (which some customers already do and very successfully) for us to ship next day to them.
Any experience, help or contacts in this field would be greatly appreciated.
Hope you are well and safe in these uncharted times.
I have about 850 imported products in my own label that some of my customers are selling online via the usual platforms eBay, Amazon etc and I want to offer a solution that helps them use all my data, descriptions/photography that my colleagues write/shoot and crucially the live stock information that is currently being churned our of my system real time for them to effectively list my whole or a portion of my product range that they see fit.
In conversation with one of my customers he has told me that he is using Linnworks and I am aware of systems like Channel Advisor.
Effectively I want a solution that can provide the data to an experienced e-commerce retailer that could say from day one list 200 products and then give me daily orders (which some customers already do and very successfully) for us to ship next day to them.
Any experience, help or contacts in this field would be greatly appreciated.
jamoor said:
Sorry to hear that.
I would have thought cloudfire edi would be able to do something for you but I am not sure if it works with Sage 200.
That’s okay it’s a starting point for me. I will take a look at it if nothing else I can start a conversation with them to see what will be a step forward. I don’t mind spending money on this however it can get into the tens of thousands very quickly with Sage which is a mild annoyance. I would have thought cloudfire edi would be able to do something for you but I am not sure if it works with Sage 200.
Sounds like you need something to extract the data from your local Sage 200 database and stick it on an FTP server your customers can access?
https://eurekaaddons.co.uk/data-exchange-sage-200/ might do the trick.
https://eurekaaddons.co.uk/data-exchange-sage-200/ might do the trick.
WokkaWokka said:
That’s okay it’s a starting point for me. I will take a look at it if nothing else I can start a conversation with them to see what will be a step forward. I don’t mind spending money on this however it can get into the tens of thousands very quickly with Sage which is a mild annoyance.
Do you anticipate this type of thing being done frequently in the future? How many people use sage?We jumped ship from Sage 200 as the entire thing is geared towards much larger businesses than ourselves and whilst flexible that came at a monumental cost for a small 10 person operation like ourselves.
WokkaWokka said:
Hi everyone,
Hope you are well and safe in these uncharted times.
I have about 850 imported products in my own label that some of my customers are selling online via the usual platforms eBay, Amazon etc and I want to offer a solution that helps them use all my data, descriptions/photography that my colleagues write/shoot and crucially the live stock information that is currently being churned our of my system real time for them to effectively list my whole or a portion of my product range that they see fit.
In conversation with one of my customers he has told me that he is using Linnworks and I am aware of systems like Channel Advisor.
Effectively I want a solution that can provide the data to an experienced e-commerce retailer that could say from day one list 200 products and then give me daily orders (which some customers already do and very successfully) for us to ship next day to them.
Any experience, help or contacts in this field would be greatly appreciated.
So I’ve done some work around this type of system.Hope you are well and safe in these uncharted times.
I have about 850 imported products in my own label that some of my customers are selling online via the usual platforms eBay, Amazon etc and I want to offer a solution that helps them use all my data, descriptions/photography that my colleagues write/shoot and crucially the live stock information that is currently being churned our of my system real time for them to effectively list my whole or a portion of my product range that they see fit.
In conversation with one of my customers he has told me that he is using Linnworks and I am aware of systems like Channel Advisor.
Effectively I want a solution that can provide the data to an experienced e-commerce retailer that could say from day one list 200 products and then give me daily orders (which some customers already do and very successfully) for us to ship next day to them.
Any experience, help or contacts in this field would be greatly appreciated.
I’m assuming you’re not storing all the “enrichment” data (specs, collateral, etc) in Sage? So are you using something like a PIM to collate that? Or perhaps you’re using one of the product lifecycle systems?
What I’ve worked on in the past (for a fashion brand) was a PIM to aggregate all the product data. We could drag live stock levels from the ERP system (SAP B1 in that case), and create one or more product / availability feeds to push out in whatever format was useful for the other end. This also made sure the other end had our fully-qualified SKUs (ie with size and colour) or variants (again depending upon application) to order against.
In terms of order capture, there are myriad ways to do that, but a simple batch system using a cordless data workflow tool is often the easiest.
Let me know if any of that sounds of use to you. The trick is to spend the time on setup and then let it basically run itself.
Stupeo said:
Sounds like you need something to extract the data from your local Sage 200 database and stick it on an FTP server your customers can access?
https://eurekaaddons.co.uk/data-exchange-sage-200/ might do the trick.
That’s already doing the live stock export to the ftp the next step is creating something that will link onto the other systems, Linnworks etc. https://eurekaaddons.co.uk/data-exchange-sage-200/ might do the trick.
skwdenyer said:
So I’ve done some work around this type of system.
I’m assuming you’re not storing all the “enrichment” data (specs, collateral, etc) in Sage? So are you using something like a PIM to collate that? Or perhaps you’re using one of the product lifecycle systems?
What I’ve worked on in the past (for a fashion brand) was a PIM to aggregate all the product data. We could drag live stock levels from the ERP system (SAP B1 in that case), and create one or more product / availability feeds to push out in whatever format was useful for the other end. This also made sure the other end had our fully-qualified SKUs (ie with size and colour) or variants (again depending upon application) to order against.
In terms of order capture, there are myriad ways to do that, but a simple batch system using a cordless data workflow tool is often the easiest.
Let me know if any of that sounds of use to you. The trick is to spend the time on setup and then let it basically run itself.
Yeah that does sound interesting. I’m assuming you’re not storing all the “enrichment” data (specs, collateral, etc) in Sage? So are you using something like a PIM to collate that? Or perhaps you’re using one of the product lifecycle systems?
What I’ve worked on in the past (for a fashion brand) was a PIM to aggregate all the product data. We could drag live stock levels from the ERP system (SAP B1 in that case), and create one or more product / availability feeds to push out in whatever format was useful for the other end. This also made sure the other end had our fully-qualified SKUs (ie with size and colour) or variants (again depending upon application) to order against.
In terms of order capture, there are myriad ways to do that, but a simple batch system using a cordless data workflow tool is often the easiest.
Let me know if any of that sounds of use to you. The trick is to spend the time on setup and then let it basically run itself.
Someone mentioned Eureka Data Exchange which has currently exporting the data from Sage and my IT support we’re helpful enough to set up an SFTP for people to get into, one issue with that is that Linnworks and my guinea pig customer can’t use SFTP.
Also yes our enriched data and images are a manual process. The descriptions, weights, barcodes etc etc all come from our website and I just copy a new version of the data when a anything changes (around 5+ new SKUs per month) then the images are Dropbox.
So overall it’s a bit of a manual process and my main aim is make it work more efficiently and seamlessly for my customers.
WokkaWokka said:
skwdenyer said:
So I’ve done some work around this type of system.
I’m assuming you’re not storing all the “enrichment” data (specs, collateral, etc) in Sage? So are you using something like a PIM to collate that? Or perhaps you’re using one of the product lifecycle systems?
What I’ve worked on in the past (for a fashion brand) was a PIM to aggregate all the product data. We could drag live stock levels from the ERP system (SAP B1 in that case), and create one or more product / availability feeds to push out in whatever format was useful for the other end. This also made sure the other end had our fully-qualified SKUs (ie with size and colour) or variants (again depending upon application) to order against.
In terms of order capture, there are myriad ways to do that, but a simple batch system using a cordless data workflow tool is often the easiest.
Let me know if any of that sounds of use to you. The trick is to spend the time on setup and then let it basically run itself.
Yeah that does sound interesting. I’m assuming you’re not storing all the “enrichment” data (specs, collateral, etc) in Sage? So are you using something like a PIM to collate that? Or perhaps you’re using one of the product lifecycle systems?
What I’ve worked on in the past (for a fashion brand) was a PIM to aggregate all the product data. We could drag live stock levels from the ERP system (SAP B1 in that case), and create one or more product / availability feeds to push out in whatever format was useful for the other end. This also made sure the other end had our fully-qualified SKUs (ie with size and colour) or variants (again depending upon application) to order against.
In terms of order capture, there are myriad ways to do that, but a simple batch system using a cordless data workflow tool is often the easiest.
Let me know if any of that sounds of use to you. The trick is to spend the time on setup and then let it basically run itself.
Someone mentioned Eureka Data Exchange which has currently exporting the data from Sage and my IT support we’re helpful enough to set up an SFTP for people to get into, one issue with that is that Linnworks and my guinea pig customer can’t use SFTP.
Also yes our enriched data and images are a manual process. The descriptions, weights, barcodes etc etc all come from our website and I just copy a new version of the data when a anything changes (around 5+ new SKUs per month) then the images are Dropbox.
So overall it’s a bit of a manual process and my main aim is make it work more efficiently and seamlessly for my customers.
It also makes replatforming your website a doddle if you need to, since you’re not tied to your cart’s backend; or for instance creating non-English versions of content, and so on. Also easy to expand into other platforms yourself, again without being tied into any particular other platforms.
Obviously that takes a little time, but can be a great investment.
Said PIM can also take your suppliers’ data as an input (if that’s relevant to your business); you can set up an enrichment workflow.
Eureka Data Exchange I’ve not worked with (because not worked with Sage 200), but seems to solve a problem and save having to get down and dirty with APIs! But from a brief investigation it would fit well into the architecture above.
The PIM stuff doesn’t have to be crippling cost-wise - PIMCore’s open source stuff is good, for instance, whilst Akeneo can also do well in the right environment.
All that said, for 5 new SKUs per month this may all be a bit heavyweight.
An alternate approach is to standardise all the product enrichment stuff in simple Dropbox folders with files named by SKU. Then I’d look to see if Eureka can be set up with a rule that populates an output field with a constructed URL (Dropbox path + SKU + file extension etc), so you can at least automatically generate a feed. Or Eureka may be able to scrape that data from your website - reading their data sheet talks of a SQL data store so some data transformation may be possible on the fly.
There will always be a way, even it requires a bit of scripting
Export data from sage to a CSV file
Upload CSV file to your server via FTP and have it doing this every couple of mins to keep stock levels correct for people using the data. (Although you mind need to explore a more real time stock level solution if that's important.)
Provide customers with access to the CSV file which they can then import into linnworks which has this ability built in.
Upload CSV file to your server via FTP and have it doing this every couple of mins to keep stock levels correct for people using the data. (Although you mind need to explore a more real time stock level solution if that's important.)
Provide customers with access to the CSV file which they can then import into linnworks which has this ability built in.
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