The ideal Amazon / eBay / Magento order management software

[Deleted member 244015]

HI Guys,

I'm new to the forum, nice to meet you all.

Let's begin with a little introduction about the company. We are around 4 years old, sell on all of the available amazon networks (amazon.de, amazon.co.uk, amazon.fr, amazon.es, amazon.com amazon.it) and all of the available ebay international networks and will be shortly investing in a magento site. We have around 25,000 orders a month one third of which are international.

We currently use Aimco's Packing Partner alongside SAGE 200 to process our orders and the whole processing system could do with a complete revamp to something more intelligent.

After a year of contemplating what service to upgrade to we are really none the wiser. We have been looking into Tradebox, Linnworks and Seller Express but really dont no which way to go. I dont want to go down the route of Channel Advisor due to the commission they tie you into.

I'm interested to know what similar sized or larger sized eBay / Amazon sellers use to manage their orders and perhaps could recommend. Ideally there would be a seamless integration with Sage 200 but I'm aware that this kind of thinking is ambitious.

Any help is appreciated.

Josh

 

[samuel5]

Hi Josh,

Your business sounds almost identical to ours with regards to the numbers, the marketplaces and where your at.
And we currently use Aimco, Sage, Channel Advisor and Tradebox but are in the process of making our systems much more streamlined.

We are having our dated OScommerce websites redesigned and switching over to Magento.
There is a plug in that we will be using to upload our products from Magneto direct to Amazon and eBay. All our orders will appear in one simple database and automatically enter into Sage.
This should allow us to leave Channel Advisor as their service is not worth the money at all!

We also have a new warehouse management system being installed that will keep inventory levels accurate and allow us to dispatch orders more efficiently.

Tradebox has worked wonders for us and we will most probably still use it for updating Sage if the magneto plug in does not do this very well.

Aimco has been good and we customised our version very heavily to suit our needs.

PM me your contact details as it will be interesting talking to you.

Sam

 

[Deleted member 244015]

Hi Sam,

Id be interested to know what solution your looking at. For your interest as the moment it currently takes around 4 or 5 hours to process around 1500 orders. We transfer directly from Packing partner via xml file to Sage 200 and have a team of 2 working all day in the operations team.

We would love to be able to use Tradebox but unfortunately there is no compatibility with Sage 200 at the moment. Packing partner works well but works better for smaller volumes, we have also customised it to do what we want with xml exports but felt the support was limited and feel we are beginning to out grow it.

We have briefly used a trail of Linnworks but I found it a bit overwhelming to use compared to what we're used too.

Thanks for the feedback on Channel Advisor, they used to hassle us over the phone non stop last year and I'm pretty glad we never signed up.

Have you looked into Seller Express?

Josh

 

[samuel5]

How comes you need Sage 200 and cannot just do with Sage line 50?

If it's to do with the amount of transactions you do, Sage 2015 will handle it with no issues.
(At worst, you may have to clear transactions every 6 months)
Do you use Sage for stock control as well?

I've not looked at Seller Express but I've been promised out new Magento platform will handle everything in one place.

We have just started using a warehouse management system for stock and order control from a company called Peoplevox.
Although at the moment it is slowing us down rapidly but hopefully it's just teething problems.

Sam

 

[SamStones]

Hi,

I'd be interested in knowing how you manage to process 1,500 orders in 4-5 hours? That would take our team of 7 probably 20 hours to manage that many orders!

What products are you selling?

We've used Magento for 3 years but we're looking to move on from it as its slow and buggy once all the necessary extensions are loaded onto it.

All ideas welcome.

 

[samuel5]

Hi,

I'd be interested in knowing how you manage to process 1,500 orders in 4-5 hours? That would take our team of 7 probably 20 hours to manage that many orders!

What products are you selling?

We've used Magento for 3 years but we're looking to move on from it as its slow and buggy once all the necessary extensions are loaded onto it.

All ideas welcome.

I think Josh means 4 - 5 hours to import 1500 orders into Sage, not to dispatch them?

I thought Magento was meant to be the top platform to use!

 

[SamStones]

Hi,

Ah, ok, I thought he'd meant 4-5 hours to dispatch the orders! Ok, so this seems like a long time to do what should be an automated import?

Magento is great for web site software as there's lots of features but ours has slowed down dramatically as we've got more products, extensions and customers. Together with all the background work of extensions like the m2epro extension for Amazon and eBay and it's just ridiculous. We don't have the technical expertise or time in house to continuously monitor the server and have had several server admins look at it unable to fix problems - long times to save products or save a simple attribute update. We've just had enough really!

 

[antropy]

Have a look at setting up OpenCart with Linnworks and Tradebox to get things in to Sage.

 

[antropy]

you are thinking of a big and heavy platform, so Magento is the best option for you

This reminds me of a quote:

“Measuring programming progress by lines of code is like measuring aircraft building progress by weight.”
― Bill Gates

 

[samuel5]

Together with all the background work of extensions like the m2epro extension for Amazon and eBay and it's just ridiculous. We don't have the technical expertise or time in house to continuously monitor the server and have had several server admins look at it unable to fix problems - long times to save products or save a simple attribute update. We've just had enough really!

The M2E pro extension is what our new web developer will be setting up for us.

Does it do the job properly of managing Amazon, eBay and Magento all in one place?

Thanks

Sam

 

[Deleted member 244015]

Hi guys,

Thanks for all the responses.

We use an .xml export from packing partner to get the orders into Sage. It then takes us 4-5 hours to allocate stock / order new stock / create back orders etc. A lot of which involves manually moving printer orders around different pigeon holes.

The trouble we have is finding a program that would integrate with Sage 200. We have a sister company we share our inventory with so are firmly dependent on this system.

We would like to accurately adjust our listings to correspond with stock changes in Sage and to eliminate over selling, but have not found any programs that are able to provide this integration?

This afternoon we'll be approaching Linnworks, Channel Grabber and Seller Express to get their opinions on the situation but I dont think any of them will be 'perfect' for us.

We plan to integrate Magento into the current system but by what you guys are saying it sounds like we could do with another piece of software to manage our ebay / amazon orders and stock levels.

For your interest we also use appeagle as a third party re-pricing tool.

Cheers,

Josh

 

[Linn Systems]

HI Josh,

We have briefly used a trail of Linnworks but I found it a bit overwhelming to use compared to what we're used too.

Sorry to hear that you struggled getting started.

If you are still looking into Order management systems, I would be interested in hearing from you directly. Maybe I could help you by walking you through some of the processes in getting started?

Feel free to call me on 020 3651 7045 or PM me and Ill be happy to assist you.

Kind Regards

Richard Maxted
Business Development Executive
Linn Systems LTD