E-commerce Integration: Amazon & Macy's

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Background

This project was initiated to integrate directly with three E-commerce vendors. Earlier, these vendors were using a tool called PFSWEB to integrate with SAP and other backend systems.

These vendors were

1. Amazon


2. Macy’s


3. Company's website hosted by a vendor

Previous to this integration, process for handling E-commerce sales was as follows

1. Manual upload and maintenance of materials offered for sales


2. Daily upload of inventory via a middleware vendor


3. Sales order creation and initial credit card/Gift Card/Paypal authorization by E-commerce vendors


4. Delivery confirmation send back to vendors for funds settlement


5. Email integration with Sales Force Marketing Cloud by vendor


6. Returns handled by warehouse and information shared with vendors for credit to customer


7. Gift Card upload and values managed by vendors.

Goals and Overall Process

Goal of the project was to migrate most of the E-commerce processes inside the company environment to reduce costs and have more visibility of customer behavior.

After this project processes were changed as follows

1. Remained same: Manual upload and maintenance of materials offered for sales


2. Direct daily upload of inventory wherever possible


3. Remained same: Sales order creation and initial credit card/Gift Card/Paypal authorization by E-commerce vendors


4. Email integration with Sales Force Marketing Cloud


5. Delivery confirmation for funds settlement


6. Returns handled by warehouse


7. Remained Same: information shared with vendors for credit to customer


8. Gift Card upload and values


9. Returns and Customer service through new FIORI Apps

Details: Integration with Amazon

Integration with Amazon proved to be toughest when it came to gathering information. Amazon has published details of an API, but it proved to be impossible to get a person from Amazon who can help us with the integration.

After spending a fruitless month to get somebody from Amazon, it was decided to use a tool called AMTP, which is a sFTP process. The reason for using this tool was that one of the divisions of the company was using it and it helped the project team coordinate with someone who has done the integration.

After Integration, process flow for Amazon was as follows.

1. Materials maintained manually.


2. Inventory uploaded daily using a XML file.


3. Sales order come in via sFTP and picked up by PI.


4. PI creates sales order in SAP via IDocs.


5. Delivery is created automatically and data passed on to warehouse software, PKMS.


6. PKMS confirms delivery and shares information with SAP.


7. SAP receives delivery confirmation and IDocs pick, pack and do PGI.


8. Delivery information is send to Amazon.


9. Returns are received by warehouse using a brand new FIORI app to create credit memo requests.


10. Creating credit memo requires searching for original sales order. This is done using customer address attributes from the return slip.


11. A report is generated to be used by the Ecommerce team for handling returns manually at Amazon vendor’s portal.

 

Details: Integration with Macy’s

Integration with Macy’s proved to be very exhaustive, though technically it was the easiest one.  We worked directly with Macy’s IT team to publish XML messages which were exchanged via sFTP.

Overall flow for Macy’s was as below

1. Materials maintained manually.


2. Inventory uploaded daily using a XML file.


3. Sales order comes in via sFTP and picked up by PI.


4. PI creates sales order in SAP via IDocs.


5. Delivery is created automatically and data passed on to warehouse software, PKMS.


6. PKMS confirms delivery and shares information with SAP.


7. SAP receives delivery confirmation and IDocs pick, pack and do PGI.


8. Delivery information is send to Macy’s.


9. Returns are received by warehouse using a brand new FIORI app to create credit memo requests.


10. Creating credit memo requires searching for original sales order. This is done using customer address attributes from the return slip.


11. A report is generated to be used by the Macy’s and Ecommerce team for processing returns.

In the next blog, I will continue with more details on integration with E-commerce website and challenges of the project.