Unified Seller Portal on Marketplaces

[totumTranslationBot]

Original post: totumonline/totum-ru-issues-and-discussions#523

Hello everyone. We have a couple of online stores, we are listed on marketplaces with different delivery methods, and products are purchased from several suppliers with or without API.
As the project developed, we encountered many routine tasks, which we solved through automation using N8N + RetailCRM + Google Sheets. The latter two services, of course, are not scalable and flexible, which became the starting point for implementing Totum.

Current stack: N8N + Totum. The data calculated there is transmitted to RetailCRM + to the website (opencart/MySQL) + marketplaces like Amazon + Telegram notifications and bots.

Of course, this is not a simple project that only uses Totum methods, but for us, it frees up a huge amount of time that we previously spent doing manually. Also, RetailCRM has many modules for each MP, you can spend a lot of money, and it will replace our scheme. But all this comes down not only to the cost of each module but also to their limitations and capabilities.

What problems does the project solve:

1. Current stock levels on marketplaces: when the last unit of a product is ordered from the warehouse, all Express deliveries and all FBS deliveries (from our warehouse) are turned off at once, but direct sales from suppliers remain. Similarly, when updating data from suppliers. The rest of the information is transmitted via cron.

2. Automatic price calculation relative to purchase prices: the supplier provides the price for the product - Totum calculates the selling price for the website + promotional price for the website + product price for each sales scheme on the marketplace, taking into account all their full commissions (UNIT-economics) + our markup or discount.
   !! Totum calculates the cost and profit from selling the product on different sales schemes (FBS or DBS or Express) and disables unprofitable sales schemes.

3. Daily N8N monitors commissions on all marketplaces, and when they are updated (as it turned out, they change logistics or return costs every day), product prices on the marketplace that updated the commissions are recalculated.

4. Monitoring MSRP considering promotions - if the supplier controls, parses, and blocks shipments when prices are reduced, it is necessary to check the placement and raise them in time to avoid getting banned.

5. Separate reports on product reservations in orders, stock levels, order data. Reports on problematic products (if the promotion is unprofitable, the supplier provided incorrect data, etc.), sales are automatically disabled. Report on tracked products (you can mark products that need to be monitored for quantity).

And many, many other aspects that Totum helps to solve. Moreover, the more we develop in Totum, the more tasks we come up with and implement. For example, daily travel sheets for our couriers to provide to the traffic police or tax authorities, which was not planned at all but was easily implemented :) I will only talk about the core of our project.

MAIN:

Dashboard with quick links to reports or tables.
Product search by word, for example, you need to display all air conditioners in the table - we made our own, as it is impossible to click on each air conditioner for a long time in the select or filter, Meili Search also did not fit. We solved it simply: when adding a product, we broke the name into tags in the Data field and added it to the filter.

FULL PRODUCT CATALOG:

This is not the main line, but work with products starts from this table. The main difficulty is that products have different variants - configuration or color. Since the variants of products are placed on the MP, the main line is the next table - Product Offers.

Products are loaded into the catalog by a button from the website. Then a product offer is automatically created for it. And if the product has several variants, we can create an additional one.

PRODUCT OFFERS

Main line. Each offer is a cycle, in the cycle a table with placement options on marketplaces.

There are three types of table display: Main, Prices, and Stock.

• In the main view, you can change the availability on the website and marketplaces, change the Supplier, as well as add stock to the warehouse and change the product price.

Some product fields are blocked for changes if a Supplier with configured integration is selected. To change the data, you need to disable Auto-update.

• When auto-update is enabled, the current price = MSRP and the quantity of the product at the supplier will be automatically set.

• When the Stock view is enabled, most columns are hidden for comfortable work with product quantity.
• When the Prices view is enabled, purchase, promotional, and main prices of product offers are displayed.

PRODUCT OFFER CYCLE

Main features: automatic calculation and information on prices, setting up work schemes with marketplaces, forced data update on the marketplace/website (main synchronization via cron).

For Totum to know which product offers belong to products from marketplaces, they need to be linked. For this, catalogs of each MP are loaded via API and linked in the Marketplaces section through selects.

For each product placement, you can set where to take the stock from - for example, Express from our warehouse, DBS from the supplier's warehouse, etc. You can also fix the value for placement. Each price has a profit calculation.

WAREHOUSES

Convenient work with sales schemes on marketplaces is also implemented - you can set up manual or API data updates. And stop sales from one window on all MPs.

Overall, Totum has helped us a lot: it works quickly, and with a certain desire and skills, you can attach absolutely everything that meets your needs and imagination. Thank you.