With 1.5 million visitors per day, the Amazon marketplace offers a great opportunity for SMB online retailers to gain exposure. But how exactly do you use Amazon to grow your business? Here are two approaches -

Product ads by Amazon – This works very similar to Google adwords. You display pay-per-click advertisements in the product pages of Amazon.com. For example, if you are selling furniture, then Amazon will display advertisements for your product in the product pages of similar furniture from other vendors. So, once the customer narrows down to the exact product that she wants, Amazon is displaying your information right there on that page with your price information (see image below), and the customer can reach your webstore in just one click. The order transaction occurs on your website, and therefore there are no additional fees that Amazon charges you. 

Sell on Amazon.com – In this approach, you are listing your products on the Amazon marketplace, and the order transaction happens through Amazon.com. Products from your inventory are listed side-by-side with the products from Amazon’s own inventory. Once the customer completes the purchase, Amazon notifies you and lets you fulfill the order. But since the order was captured on the Amazon.com site, they will charge you a percentage of the product price and additional fees for the item that sells.

So, what are the main differences between “Product Ads” vs “Selling on Amazon”?

1. Product Ads drive traffic to your own website outside Amazon. Whereas “Selling on Amazon” lets the customer buy your product without ever leaving the Amazon website
2. Product Ads require you to deal with the credit card transaction on your website. “Selling on Amazon” takes care of the credit card transaction on its own
3. Product Ads let you control the customers’s buying experience because they are on your website. “Selling on Amazon” gives you no control over the customers’s buying experience
4. Products Ads charge you a cost-per-click – in other words, you are buying targeted traffic from Amazon. “Selling on Amazon” charges you cost-per-action – in other words, they charge you a percentage of your order sale price and an additional fee for that order

Even though these are two different approaches, you can combine them to expose your entire product catalog to the millions of shoppers on the Amazon.com website.

Amazon has been struggling with ecommerce sales tax problems for a while now. The latest trouble was with the state of California. In June of 2011, the state Governor passed a new bill that effectively caused Amazon to terminate its “nexus” with thousands of California-based “associates”.

Now, that decision is being reversed after they struck a deal with the state. According to the deal, Amazon will

start collecting sales tax on purchases made by California residents starting in September 2012 if the Amazon is unable to come up with a federal deal in which a uniform online sales tax policy is adopted by Congress by next July

This new bill was signed into law on September 23, 2011. (Read more here…)

Tonight we released yet another update to Ordoro. Your favorite application now has a new skin, and new polish. But the best is yet to come! Our designers are hard at work, and during the next few weeks, you will see sharper looking pages, smoother workflows, and more automations!

This update also comes with some cool new features that catapult Ordoro way ahead of our competition. Here is a short preview -

• USPS shipping with Regional Priority Mail option
• Fedex shipping with Dry Ice option
• UPS shipping with Next Day Air Saver option
• Integration with 3dcart
• Automatically tagging the BigCommerce unpaid orders
• Enhancements to the PO and Product pages
• BigCommerce tracking number write back tweaks
• Include customer notes in shipments export

We want to hear what you think about the new look. Please login, click around, play with these features, and send us your feedback. Because that’s what helps us build an amazing product!

Good short article from Lexiconn on the difference between “Google Product Category” (a new required field in the Google Product Feed) and “Product Type” (another required field in the Google Product Feed).

Rob nicely explains the difference between these two fields and what to use each field for.

Here is a good article from Practical Ecommerce on how to use Amazon to grow your ecommerce business.

Many of the Ordoro users sell on Amazon along with other platforms. And Ordoro helps them keep inventory in sync across Amazon and other webstores and also aggregate orders from these platforms.

Great way to start a day by reading an awesome review from a customer on the BigCommerce forum

[Ordoro] honestly is awesome. It has made my life so much easier with not having to manually take off inventory, automatically updating big commerce and amazon with tracking numbers. My Account Manager on their side was amazing. He was so helpful and always answered my emails quickly. They also listen to your needs, the developers are ready to make any changes to make sure the system fits what you need

- Clelia Iaia, LabelShopper.com

We’ve been getting a lot of sales calls lately asking about Ordoro’s dropshipping features. And a majority of these calls have been coming in from the BigCommerce merchants. So, last week, we made a video explaining the absolute basics of dropshipping – If you are just getting started with dropshipping on your webstore, what are the important steps to remember? Watch the 3 minute video to learn more.

And the folks at BigCommerce posted our dropshipping 101 video on their blog. And we love all the attention we’ve been getting because of that video! Here it is.

Write-back into BigCommerce

In Ordoro version 1.11 that we released last week, we included a very exciting feature – “the write-back into BigCommerce”.

There are two parts to this feature -

1. If you are using BigCommerce 6 or BigCommerce 7, then Ordoro will automatically update the shipping label tracking number into your BigCommerce account and mark the order as “shipped”
2. If you are using BigCommerce 7, then Ordoro will automatically update the on-hand quantities in BigCommerce when you change the stock level in Ordoro

Why are we so excited about this? Because Ordoro is the only order management system that can actually write-back data into BigCommerce. This was the most demanded feature by our BigCommerce userbase, and we put in a lot of effort into getting this to work. And it provides great benefits to our BigCommerce user base.

Why does tracking number write-back matter?

The tracking number write-back feature completes the loop of information flow between you and your customer. Here is how.

Once you create a shipping label in Ordoro, then Ordoro automatically updates the tracking number in BigCommerce, for that order, and marks that order as shipped. Once this happens, BigCommerce sends a shipment notification email to your customer with the tracking number embedded in the email. If the customer logs into into her account on your webstore, she is always up to date on the order status, and the tracking number is easily available right there.

This feature directly improves your customer service level because your customers are always up to date on their order status. This feature also reduces your customer service costs because now you will have fewer customers calling you or emailing you asking for order status. It’s a small feature that goes a long way towards growing your ecommerce business.

Why does inventory write-back matter?

This is a great feature for merchants who are selling on multiple storefronts. For example, many of the Ordoro customers sell on BigCommerce AND on Amazon market place. Ordoro is great at aggregating orders from these multiple store fronts into one view so that you can easily process these orders – either from your warehouse, or assign them to a dropshipper.

But this new feature (inventory write-back) ensures that your inventory information is in sync between your BigCommerce store and your Amazon storefront. Here is how exactly it works.

If you sell a few units of a product in Amazon, then Ordoro automatically reduces the stock levels for that product in BigCommerce. If you sell a few units in BigCommerce, then Ordoro automatically reduces the stock levels for that product in Amazon. In other words, Ordoro ensures that the inventory picture is accurate and up-to-date in all your webstores all the time.

Having accurate inventory numbers in your webstores is necessary to

1. Avoid losing a sale because the webstore mistakenly has lower inventory than what you really have
2. Avoid back-orders because webstore thinks you have more in stock than what you really have

(Note: This inventory sync feature has always been a highlight of Ordoro ever since we did our first integration with the Shopsite and Amazon platforms. But the BigCommerce inventory write-back was released only in version 1.11)

If you want to learn more about how the tracking number write-back and inventory management write-back features work, create a free trial account of Ordoro, link it to your BigCommerce account and give it a whirl.

Ordoro version 1.11.0 is now live! This is a major version upgrade with many exciting features.

The feature we are most excited about is the two-way writeback into BigCommerce! Here is how it works -

• Tracking number notification writeback into BigCommerce : When you create a shipping label (UPS, USPS, Fedex) using Ordoro, then we automatically write back the tracking number into BigCommerce. So that your customers can track their order status in your webstore
• Inventory writeback into BigCommerce : If you are selling on multiple BigCommerce stores, and/or marketplaces like Amazon, then Ordoro will keep your inventory information in sync between all these websites

But that is just one of the major features we have added to Ordoro. Here is a complete list of enhancements in this version. And as usual, all Ordoro users get access to the new features automatically when they login.

Try them out and keep sending us your feedback.

April 27, 2011 – Version 1.11.0

• Shipment notification write back into BigCommerce (Tracking number and Order status are automatically updated in BigCommerce when the order ships in Ordoro)
• Inventory write back into BigCommerce. When the inventory quantity is modified in Ordoro, now we can automatically write the inventory levels into BigCommerce
• Currency symbol can be changed globally via the company setting page
• Price comparison across different shipping methods – For UPS and USPS. (Fedex rate comparison already works)
• Changed the default Endicia ‘content type’ to ‘merchandise’ instead of  ’documents’
• Added ‘category’ column to the order export csv format
• Simplified the email settings. Users no longer have to meddle with the Mail API Key
• Endicia settings usability improvements – Added help article link, Renamed password to passphrase
• Bugfix – Corner cases for Purchase Order and Goods Receipt creation
• Bugfix – USPS International form Country Code related corner cases
• Bugfix – Decimal product weights will get saved correctly now

Version 1.9.0 has enhancements to UPS label printing, and dropshipping. We have also made improvements to the BigCommerce product import feature. And we rounded it up with a few performance improvements and some data import ui experience improvements. Below is a detailed list of the changes. And you can see the complete release history here.

April 15, 2011 – Version 1.9.0

• Additional parameters for UPS labels – Signature Required, Business vs Residential address, Declared value for insurance, Reference number on the label
• Additional columns to the CSV inventory import file – Weights
• Additional columns to the CSV inventory export file – COGS
• Import the payment type information from Shopsite
• Add customer phone number, merchant account number in the dropship email
• Ability to import BigCommerce product file from your desktop
• Improvements to the order/inventory import ui experience. More fine-grained status updates during Amazon import
• More performance improvements to the inventory page
• Import productcost during BigCommerce product import
• Bugfix – Corner cases for BigCommerce product import
• Bugfix – Shipment email quantity display is fixed
• Bugfix – Amazon grand total calculations