eCommerce data – Why should sellers maintain?

Selling online is no piece of cake. With so much to take care of sales, orders, returns, payments, accounting and more than too at multiple marketplaces it becomes hard to understand the most relevant information that must be captured to make the most out of it.

Today, we will talk about 4 types of eCommerce data every seller should maintain:

The Master File

The master file is a must-have eCommerce data if you are selling online or planning to start online sales. The master file has majorly two components: Product Master and Listing Mapping.

The product master must contain all the products available for sale with the unique product name and SKU. It must have the following fields for this type of eCommerce data: Product name, Master SKU and the channel SKUs of the product across all the marketplaces. In the listing mapping file, maintain the mapping of the product SKU with the listings in the marketplace also, record the price along with the pricing history for the listings.

This type of eCommerce data helps you keep tight control on listing and delisting of products across various marketplaces and also provides insights into your sales and return statistics. A record of the pricing history will also help you understand the amount and payments of the claim.

Dispatched Order List

This type of eCommerce data keeps track of the orders being dispatched from your end on a daily basis. The dispatched orders file must contain the order number and date of dispatch. Do not forget to maintain a separate record for the cancelled orders.

With this eCommerce data, it becomes easy to reconcile the seller data of dispatched orders with the marketplace data of dispatched orders ensuring that no order goes missing, hence saving a lot of payment and accounting hassles.

Returned Order List

Returns are the biggest leaks in the eCommerce industry which makes it a very important eCommerce data to keep a record of returns physically being received at your end and recording the condition in which the product is received. In the returned order list, record product name, SKU, initiated and expected date of return and status of the return. Match the returns data provided by marketplaces with your own eCommerce data to look for any discrepancies.

In case the return is missing or received the product is damaged and not re-sellable or the wrong item is received, a record of this eCommerce data would help in raising the Safe-T claims with the marketplaces hence reducing the losses incurred.

Order-wise Payout Report

This eCommerce data is a record of the amount that has been paid against an order. Update the status and amount of every order whenever a payment is received. This way, you can easily find out if the correct payments are being received. Also, in case of returns record the refund that has been made against an order.

By doing this, you can ensure that no order remains unpaid by the marketplaces and can also keep track of the average payouts and profit margins against all the orders and SKUs which can help in the pricing of the products along with efficient funds management.

Don’t just do eCommerce sales, learn eCommerce sales. This might look a lot while you start recording eCommerce data. But of course, you don’t want just business, you want a well-managed business that can survive through all the challenge that comes with eCommerce. Keeping this eCommerce data would give you a closer look at what’s happening and what has happened so far in your multi-channel sales allowing you to make the best decisions for growing your business.

In the next series of posts, we will see how to use excel to keep track of each of these data with a detailed example for major marketplaces.

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