Zoho Inventory

Zoho Inventory - Amazon US Integration

Things to remember


Integrating with Amazon

To integrate your Amazon account with your Zoho Inventory organization:

  1. Go to Integrations on the left sidebar.
  2. Select the eCommerce section and click the Set Up Now button under Amazon.
Amazon setup
  1. You’ll be redirected to Amazon’s website. If you haven’t logged in, enter your credentials and click Sign in.
  2. If you’re already logged in, you’ll be taken to the authorization page where you have to consent to share your Seller Partner Account data with Zoho Inventory by checking the checkbox at the bottom of the page.
  3. Click Confirm.
Authorize Amazon

Your Amazon Seller Central account will be integrated with your Zoho Inventory account.

Fulfilment by Amazon

Fulfilment by Amazon (FBA) facilitates sellers to rent Amazon’s storage space to keep their goods, while also fulfiling online orders and handling customer services.

How FBA works

  1. The seller ships his goods to Amazon’s storage facility where they sort and store the products.
  2. When a customer orders an item, Amazon picks and packs it from their nearest warehouse.
  3. They ship the packages and share the tracking information with the seller.
  4. Post delivery, Amazon handles customer feedbacks and services.
  5. On a biweekly basis, Amazon deposits the seller’s share of profit in their bank account after deduction.

Advantages of using FBA:

Setting up FBA in Zoho Inventory

In Zoho Inventory, you can designate a warehouse to track your FBA goods and orders.

Note: The FBA tracking and warehouse mapping are mutually exclusive features i.e., at a given time, you can enable only one of them.

To designate an FBA warehouse:

  1. Go to Settings, then Integrations.

  2. Open Marketplaces.

  3. If you’ve already integrated with Amazon, click Set FBA Warehouse. Otherwise, you can set up FBA during integration.

    FBA setup
  4. In the pop-up, select the warehouse and click Confirm.

    Select FBA warehouse

Note: Cross-border feature is not supported as of yet, i.e., your business location in Zoho Inventory must be set as U.S.A in order to enable FBA for your organization.

Marking FBA Items

Products that are handled by Amazon can be marked as FBA items in Zoho Inventory. Also, ensure that you have actively listed them on Amazon.

To mark FBA item:

  1. Go to the Items module on the left sidebar.

  2. Select the items you want to mark as as FBA.

  3. Click on the Bulk Actions button at the top.

  4. Select Mark as FBA Item option from the drop-down.

    Select FBA warehouse

Alternatively,

  1. Go to the Items module on the left sidebar.
  2. Open the item you want to mark as as FBA.
  3. Click on More and select Mark as FBA Item from the drop-down.

If you no longer want the item to be FBA tracked, follow the steps above and select Mark as MFN item from the drop-down.

Some sellers project one item as several items on amazon(Amazon fulfilled and seller fulfilled). If you are one of those sellers, then you can link multiple FBA and MFN items to a single Zoho Inventory item. This not only helps maintain a master stock for multiple online items but also allows you to dispatch shipment from the nearest warehouse while cutting down on the FBA processing charges.

To link an FBA/MFN item to a Zoho Inventory item:

  1. Go to the Zoho Inventory Dashboard.
  2. Under the Product Details section click on Unconfirmed Items.
  3. Click on an amazon item to view its details.
  4. Click the Link to existing item button in the item details page.
  5. Select an item in Zoho Inventory to which you want to link this sales channel item.
  6. Click Merge.

Stock Sync

When you mark an item as FBA, its current stock in Amazon gets fetched into Zoho Inventory. If there is a mismatch, you can record the difference as an adjustment.

To view the FBA stock for an item,

  1. Go to Items in the left sidebar

  2. Click on the FBA item to view its details.

  3. Go to the Associated Sales Channels section.

  4. Click the sync icon next to Stock Details to fetch the current stock from Amazon. If there is a difference in stock between the two platforms, it’s indicated as Mismatch.

  5. Click on Mismatch to drill-down the details.

  6. Click Adjust Stock to update the stock difference in your FBA warehouse.

    FBA stock details

Inbound Shipment

An Inbound Shipment is Amazon’s term for sending your items from your warehouse to an Amazon Fulfillment Center, where it will be stored and delivered to your customer by Amazon.

Learn More

FBA Orders

When a customer places an order for an FBA item on Amazon, it gets recorded as a force-fulfilled order in Zoho Inventory. You will not be able to edit the order or change its shipping status, since it is shipped and tracked by Amazon.

Outbound Shipment

If you sell an FBA item offline or on other marketplaces, you must create an outbound shipment for that item.

Scenario: Mark runs a handicraft business which he sells offline, as well as on Amazon. He cannot afford a warehouse or hire workforce, so he avails the FBA service from Amazon. In Zoho Inventory, he adds a warehouse to track his FBA stock and orders. Whenever he receives an offline quote, he records a sales order with the FBA item and creates an outbound shipment. Amazon ships the consignment from their warehouse and periodically updates the status of the order in Zoho Inventory.

To create an outbound shipment:

  1. Log in to your Zoho Inventory organization.
  2. Open the sales order with the FBA item.
  3. Click Create, then click Outbound Shipment from the drop-down.
  4. A fulfilment request is sent to Amazon for the FBA items in the order.
  5. Amazon picks, packs and ships the consignments and updates the shipping status in Zoho Inventory. You can also fetch the status manually.

The non-FBA items in the order must be shipped separately by you.

Change FBA Warehouse

To change your FBA warehouse in Zoho Inventory:

Disable FBA

To disable FBA in Zoho Inventory:

  1. Go to Integrations in the left sidebar, then Marketplaces.

  2. Under Amazon, click Disable FBA

    Disable FBA

You will no longer be able to track your FBA items or create outbound shipments in Zoho Inventory.


Amazon Global Selling

Note:  This feature is available only in the United States and Canada editions of Zoho Inventory.

Once you configure Amazon Global Selling for the first time, you can use Amazon Global Selling to manage the items you sell across multiple Amazon marketplaces, using a single organization.

Note: The warehouse that you’ve mapped with the primary Amazon marketplace will be used to store all the items that are synced from the other marketplaces that you add.

To configure Amazon Global Selling:

View store details Configure Amazon Global Selling

Now all the orders from the marketplaces that you’ve added will be synced with Zoho Inventory.

Disable Amazon Global Selling

To disable Amazon Global Selling:

Remove Amazon Global Selling

Once you remove the marketplace, Zoho Inventory will stop syncing orders from it. All orders that were imported already will still be available in Zoho Inventory. Any new orders that were being synced while you removed the marketplace, will be imported.

Warehouse mapping

Initially after setting up the integration, orders from Amazon are tracked in the primary warehouse and stock updates take place in the organization level. You can however, choose a specific warehouse from which you want to update the stock to your sales channel.

Prerequisite: Make sure to enable the Multi-warehouse feature in Zoho Inventory before proceeding.

Note: The FBA tracking and warehouse mapping are mutually exclusive features i.e., at a given time, you can enable only one of them.

To map a warehouse:

  1. Log in to Zoho Inventory.

  2. Go to Settings > Integrations > Marketplaces.

  3. Go to Amazon and click Show Details.

  4. Under Modules in Sync, click the toggle button to enable warehouse mapping.

    Amazon warehouse mapping toggle
  5. In the following pop-up, choose the warehouse you want to associate with your Amazon marketplace.

    Marketplace warehouse mapping
  6. Click Save.

All stock updates and orders received henceforth from this sales channel will be tracked in this warehouse.


Sync Preferences

On successfully integrating your amazon seller account with Zoho Inventory, you can now start tracking your inventory for every sale you make in amazon.

For additional control over your integration:

  1. Navigate to Integrations.
  2. Select the Marketplaces tab.
  3. Click the Show Details button under amazon.

A page with all details associated with the integration opens up. Lets take a look at the individual options below.

Sync - auto & manual sync

Sync History

The sync history page logs the periodic syncing of items and sales orders from the respective sales channels into Zoho Inventory. For each timestamp, you can view the the number of items and sales orders that were successfully synced or had failed to sync into Zoho Inventory.

To view the sync history of a sales channel:

Sync history button in the sales

Insight: The successfully synced record histories that are older than a month and failed sync histories that are older than two months will be deleted automatically.

Resyncing Orders and Items from Amazon

You can also re-initiate a sync to once again fetch the items and sales orders that was brought into Zoho Inventory on a particular timestamp. This is beneficial when:

To re-sync a task in Zoho Inventory:

Sync history button in the sales

Sync history button in the sales

The items/sales orders that were synced on the particular timestamp will be fetched once again into Zoho Inventory.


Sync Orders and Items from a Custom Timeframe

You can also resync orders and items from a custom date range from amazon. To do so:

  1. Go to the Integrations module on the left sidebar.

  2. Click the eCommerce tab.

  3. Under Amazon integration, click the Sync Manually button.

  4. Choose whether you want to sync Items or Orders from the drop-down.

  5. Choose the Specific Period option from the ‘Fetch records from’ drop-down.

  6. Select the Start Date and the End Date.

  7. Click Initiate Sync to pull your orders or items from Amazon.

    Custom Sync

Workflow

amazon workflow

On setting up the integration between your Zoho Inventory account and amazon, all your existing data will be synced in 15 mins from successful authentication.

Sync cycle

Fulfilled order sync option in Amazon

Items
Sales Orders
Order Sync

You can choose to sync only the Confirmed orders or both Confirmed and Fulfilled orders from your marketplace to Zoho Inventory. To do so:

Insight: Changes in sync preferences will be applied across all integrated sales channels.

Order sync preference drop-down

Stock Sync
Shipments

When you create shipments for the orders from amazon, the shipping ​information you have in Zoho Inventory will be automatically updated to your amazon account.

Payments

The payment status of the inbound sales order from amazon would be displayed as a comment under the sales order. As amazon supports only paid orders, the payment status under the sales order would be indicated by a comment as Paid.


Disable integration

You can disable a integration at any point of time. To do so:


Data Protection

Amazon’s Data Protection Policy enforces strict standards to protect sensitive information from known or reasonably anticipated threats or hazards to its security and integrity, accidental loss, alteration, disclosure, and all other unlawful forms of processing. We at Zoho Inventory have implemented the following changes to protect customer data:

ADPP 1 ADPP 2
Manage your Amazon sales and stock updates with Zoho Inventory's Amazon integration
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