In addition to the standard capabilities of CartSpan that can be found HERE, the following Amazon-specific features are designed to make your life easier and provide a better shopping experience for your customers:

Factoring of FBA inventory when publishing stock availability –  CartSpan will exclude the stock held in Amazon’s fulfillment warehouses (FBA) when pushing stock availability to your individual shopping cart as well as your FBM (Fulfill By Merchant) account.  For instance, if you have 100 ‘widgets’ in the accounting system, and 10 of those are sitting in Amazon warehouses, then CartSpan will push a stock availability value of 90 to your shopping cart and the FBM (Fulfill By Merchant) record for that item.  This more accurate representation of inventory greatly reduces (or eliminates) having to explain to customers why you are unable to fulfill their order.

Easy cross-referencing utility – CartSpan allows you to create a direct cross-reference of your Amazon SKUs with your internal accounting items. This may seem like a common-sense program functions, but many third party Cloud/SAAS-based (Software As A Service) offerings require a third level of reference to support their program function.

Fewer disruptions during imports – CartSpan allows a “Dummy” item assignment as an option when no cross-reference with an accounting item can be found. This is essentially a placeholder item that allows the imports to keep ‘churning’ and the unrecognized SKU can be resolved concurrently. The item in-question is clearly prefixed to the product description to support this corrective action and support fulfillment activities.

Tax Rollback for jurisdictions in which Amazon collects and remits taxes – With tax laws evolving as they have, Amazon now collects and remits taxes on behalf of the merchant for transactions occurring in many states.  While this portion of the transaction has been effectively handled by Amazon on its side, the amount of the tax is still exposed on the API (Application Programming Interface) response and must be handled during the integration…or not. Many basic integrations don’t know what to do with this as the tax in-question is now of little interest to the merchant within their accounting system.  CartSpan offers provisions for identifying these affected tax jurisdictions and adjusting the transaction values as if the tax ‘never happened.’  The net-effect of this feature is a smoother integration with fewer requirements to manually edit transactions to support the import.

Make better deals with Many-to-One item mapping – CartSpan allows you to configure multi-pack options in Amazon that can be converted to an ‘Each’ based line item during the import. These items configured in Amazon need not exist in the accounting system. For instance, if you wish to offer a ’widget-12-pack’ in Amazon, you can indicate in the CartSpan configuration that this individual item should be converted to a line-item of ‘widget’ with a quantity of 12. Furthermore, if you wish to offer the ‘widget-12-pack’ at a collective price that is lower than list price, CartSpan will appropriately allocate the discount to the price during the import.

More G/L account options for imports –  Many competitive integrations will lock you into standard GL (General Ledger) accounts for all imports. For starters, CartSpan recognizes the GL Sales, Inventory, and Cost-of-Goods-Sold (COGS) at the individual item level during the imports. Only if you desire to assign all sales to a single GL Sales account would make the configuration. This configurable aspect of the import allows merchants to better utilize stock accounting reports for reporting profitability of individual product lines. Additionally, Amazon allows the levy of a ‘gift wrap’ fee for an item. CartSpan will allow you to direct the fee to a separate ‘Handling’ account for tracking.

More timely updates by synchronizing stock/orders at higher frequencies – The ‘Basic’ plans of competitive integrations, who’s prices are anywhere from 200-600% higher than CartSpan, DO NOT even support inventory updates and only synchronize orders once per day.  If you are running FBA, CartSpan allows inventory synchronization every 30 minutes; more frequently if not. CartSpan allows order download from Amazon (and your shopping cart) every 15 minutes or on-demand.  If you want increased synchronization frequencies and inventory management, competitors force you to upgrade to their premium plans, which then start to approach the cost of college tuition.

One reason that CartSpan can offer better synchronization frequencies is that our software communicates directly with your Amazon Seller account via your desktop and not via a third-party server that ‘meters’ your activity and tracks the number of orders you take. CartSpan doesn’t care how many orders you take or the transactional value of those orders.