Amazon Invoices

[Tech4Homes]

I've had a customer ask for an invoice following an order from Amazon....

Are they not buying from Amazon rather than me? So should they be getting an invoice from Amazon?

Likewise, I create a new customer for every order with the customer details, is this right? should I just create one customer called "Amazon" and put the invoice to that?

 

[AndyP]

Are you talking about Amazon FBA or Amazon Vendor? If it's FBA (which I suspect) then Amazon only fulfils with a delivery note so if your customer requires a VAT invoice or receipt then it will be down to you to provide it. If you are talking about Vendor then this is entirely down to Amazon although I suspect that it isn't this as the retail customer won't even know of your existence in real terms..

I hope that helps.

 

[Page]

They are buying from you - Amazon just facilitates the transaction and receives a fee for doing so.

And this is the same whether you send it yourself or use FBA

 

[antropy]

I've had a customer ask for an invoice following an order from Amazon...

Does your accounting software not make it pretty easy to generate invoices?

 

[Tech4Homes]

Yes, its extremely easy. I was just querying whether the customers purchase was with Amazon, or with me. As if their purchase was with Amazon then I shouldn't be providing the invoice.

However it seems that it's only the Amazon Vendor where it becomes Amazon's transaction in full as Amazon are the ones selling it.

 

[Pish_Pash]

It's taken me a while to get to this point, but every day, my amazon FBA orders get imported into ms access, which automatically generates a VAT receipt & automatically emails it the customers (with a covering email body in the correct language, therefore German for a purchase on Amazon.de etc)

I'd had two negative feedbacks from Amazon customer for not supplying a sales receipt over the past 18 months...not a high number (in comparison to the number of sales I've had) , but nevertheless anything that impacts my 100% seller feedback needs urgent attention....so it's a relief to get to this point.

it was also a bit of a time sump replying to VAT receipt requests from Amazon customer ....I don't get those requests now

 

[Tech4Homes]

Hi Pish_Pash, I'm using Linnworks now (after thinking about it for far too long). I've only just started using it and am still playing a bit, but it's now pulling orders from Ebay, Amazon and one of my opencart websites (will set up the other two shortly). It then processes them automatically and sends to the relevant place around 3pm each day.

I've set linnworks to automatically email a PDF copy of the invoice to the customer once it processes the order.

I will have to raise the invoices and purchases manually each week in my accounts package, I would much rather be able to continue on a per order basis rather than adding bulk sales figures. Shame there is no Linnworks > Kash Flow integration!!

There are a few things about Linnworks I really don't like (may find ways around them yet) but on the whole I can't argue that it'll save me a lot of time and take a lot of the pressure off getting orders out each day.

 

[Pish_Pash]

For linnworks, I would strongly argue not to go with opencart...I've been using it, but I'm bailing.

magento is like a breath of fresh air & integrates tightly with Linnworks (for example you can list products to magento using Linnlive, which takes all your product information you've loaded into linnworks & adds product to your website)

If you are VAT registered, Linnworks can't be used for auto emailing VAT invoices (as there are gaps in the number sequence - a big no no from HMRC's perspective)...this one (massive oversight on Linnworks behalf) has caused me a huge time sump....in the end I had to head off & create my own follow on system (all done in MS access), but every cloud has a silver lining, as I can make MS access sing & dance with my raw data now, so it was a worthwhile project.

 

[Tech4Homes]

Fair point on the invoice. I might change the wording on it to say this is not a vat invoice please email us to request one.

I will likely move the main site to magneto purely because linn doesn't work well enough with opencart. It's fine for two of my sites but the main one has product options and different sku's etc so it just won't work on opencart.

I played with magneto a while back and ended up sticking with opencart, i much prefer using magneto for orders etc etc but find opencart far easier to alter.

I'm not doing anything until were used to linn and it's working well. At the minute I'm having problems as I set up a test today and it hasn't worked!

 

[Pish_Pash]

I played with magneto a while back and ended up sticking with opencart, i much prefer using magneto for orders etc etc but find opencart far easier to alter.

Well if you revisit, I'd strongly suggest that you use Linnlive (which a free app that Linnworks give customers to create & maintain listings on Magento, Ebay & Amazon ...oh & BigCommerce, which I won't be using), by doing so, you'll find it a breeze to alter products. (I fully get why Linnworks let users use Linnlive as a free utility ...they want you to get pregnant with them ...i.e. by importing every aspect of your calatogue, the thought of moving away from Linnworks after doing so would be too much of an ordeal for most! Creates massive stickyness)

I've just bit the bullet & spent the past couple of days getting the hang of iLinnlive .... it's a great time saver - not perfect, but hey, what is?! (fwiw, I hated Opencart...yes, out the box, it's easier to get up & running & that's what made me go with it .....but as it transpires that was its only redeeming feature! After 2 years, I'll be pleased to see the back of it)

 

[Tech4Homes]

I don't really know why I gave up on Magento, I was running a test site in parallel to my main site for about a month and the new test site products were overtaking the existing ones. I just found modifying templates a bit too hard, but I will re-visit. One of my sites won't be moved because I'd have to pay someone to do it as it's too busy to risk messing it up.

I only went Linnworks because I was forced to, I now have a sales agent and he needs a way of inputting orders without access to my accounts package.

Linnworks posting to Magento is all well and good, but you can't add meta data (titles and descriptions) can you?

 

[Pish_Pash]

Linnworks posting to Magento is all well and good, but you can't add meta data (titles and descriptions) can you?

Dunno...I'm not that familiar with the Linnlive2 product (I'm simply populating a new site to cutover to using it - & it's a whole lot easier vs. using magentos GUI!), but I'd be surprised if such information isn't importable to Linnworks then mappable to Magento.

 

[Linn Systems]

Hi Tech4homes,

Linnworks posting to Magento is all well and good, but you can't add meta data (titles and descriptions) can you?

Yes, Linnlive can handle the full listing process including Titles and Descriptions from outside of Magento. The only limitation would be that you will be expected to create your store categories in Magento first.

Being a web-based tool Linnlive can access your Linnworks product data in a browser interface. this allows listing creation to be performed at a computer that doesn't have the Linnworks client installed.

For our documentation regarding listing creation for Magento in Linnlive Please Click Here.

Kind Regards,

Richard Maxted
Busienss Development Executive.
Linn Systems Ltd.

 

[Hertford Bob]

Linnworks could definitely be improved in this respect, automatic invoicing for FBA orders is something we are struggling with at the moment. Pish-Pash, what did you use to get Access to automate this?
We paid LW to create a macro to automate it but they struggle with address and postage costs. We also get a lot of requests to add VAT number or genuine billing address as LW doesn't have this information for FBA orders, these can't be added in LW so have to be created manually.

 

[Pish_Pash]

Linnworks could definitely be improved in this respect, automatic invoicing for FBA orders is something we are struggling with at the moment. Pish-Pash, what did you use to get Access to automate this?.

To be honest, it's not easy...I had to learn Access from scratch ...& also VBA (& I'm no coder...more of a kludger!) to allow the import raw data into Access, then give sequential VAT numbers (trickier than you might first think, because once imported into Access 'multi item' orders are spread over successive rows, therefore you have to use VBA to examine the order ID & see if it's the same as the last row's Order ID etc).

To create an invoice in Access is a real ordeal (& there are no easily understandable tutorials anywhere - certainly none that met our invoice needs...it took me about 4 weeks of intensive study, taking a bit from this tutorial, a bit from that tutorial, asking on Access forums blah blah.).

Auto Emailing the invoices within Access isn't as tough as creating them (though still not a breeze), & it needs a lot of effort to work out what to do & then code it (e.g. if the subsource = Amazon.de, then an email containing a VAT invoice, is sent in German, Amazon.fr ...it's sent in French etc.)

Linnworks is great but IMHO can't be used at all for VAT invoicing...also as I type, there's a LW issue where - following Amazon's recent hike to £20 for free postage - amazon have changed the way they calculate/show orders..now on Amazon FBA orders, quite often you see a 'shipping charge', but also a 'promo rebate' which cancels the shipping out...meaning the customer actually paid no shipping. Linnworks doesn't 'see' the promo rebate, so a LOT of Amazon Invoices are completely wrong (at the moment, we are having to hack these manually in Access until they issue a fix - http://www.linnsystems.com/supportforum/viewtopic.php?f=9&t=6054 ).

It's annoyances like these, that made me go the way of my own Access database. i'm so pleased I did, because - without realizing at the time I made the decision - it's subsequently allowed me to be very efficient at doing whatever I need to do with my data - e.g. stock prediction for ordering from my Asian supplier? No problem, Deciding on what items to send to Amazon warehouses? No problem (before these tasks used to take me yonks). Track zero rated orders for VAT returns? Easy etc etc....

 

[Hertford Bob]

The free postage, shipping rebate issue is a pain, other issues that we have had with Linnworks invoices are the billing addresses aren't downloaded and VAT numbers can't be added to processed orders. Also, having unknown in the address fields for missing lines looks unprofessional.

Before you decided to go the access route, did you investigate other service providers and find any that were able to handle the invoicing?

 

[Pish_Pash]

Before you decided to go the access route, did you investigate other service providers and find any that were able to handle the invoicing?

No I didn't, when I made the decision everyone was recommending Linnworks...at the time I was 'wet behind the ears' so rolled with the majority concensus. I'm still happy with Linnworks, but the amount of workarounds I'm having to put in place to 'plug' all the shortcomings you mention, is starting to get a bit unwieldy - however the thought of moving fills me with dread, so for now I will continue to adopt an Ostrich-esque attitude & just hope some of the outstanding issues are addressed soon.

I have to say though I'm quite surprised at just how many problems/bugs/quirs there are when it comes to something as basic as ensuring an invoice is sequentially numbered, has all the correct fields populated (no missing data), hasn't got the postage wrong (therefore the whole total wrong) etc....a sales order processing system, ought to have the basics squared away.

 

[Gaz Walker]

Good thread.

I've been looking for another solution to Multi Channel invoicing as obviously LW doesn't cut it.

I cannot find a perfect solution, I can only ever get close but nothing ticks all the boxes so may go for something bespoke.

The hardest one I think is Amazon as we have a good solution for web (Stripe) and eBay (Paypal) via Quaderno. This has import features as well as an API so it should be possible to get something going working for this.

Anyone other solutions?

 

[Pish_Pash]

Good thread.
The hardest one I think is Amazon as we have a good solution for web (Stripe) and eBay (Paypal) via Quaderno. This has import features as well as an API so it should be possible to get something going working for this.

This was one of the reasons I 'rolled my own'....it was causing me a lot of pain - I was constantly getting VAT invoice requests from Amazon customers (I even got one -ve feedback from an impatient German customer). Now every day, MS access auto emails all my EU customers a correct VAT receipt in their own language...no gaps in the order ID numbering sequence, no missing data, shipping correct (taking on board Amazon promo rebates), etc etc.

Frankly I'm quite shocked that nobody seems to 'get' the importance Amazon ...it's a huge marketplace ...but they expect highly of 3rd party sellers - so you'd think those offering a solution would be on top of providing one that integrates/functions well. (& the time I've had to spend deploying my own 'workaround', has robbed me of valuable time growing my business)