eCommerce Horror Stories to Tell in the Dark
Wednesday, October 28, 2020Eric Zegarski
Spooky eCommerce Horror Stories to Tell in the Dark
Do you feel it? There’s a slight crisp chill in the air, the days are getting shorter, and pumpkins are on everyone’s porch. Halloween is right around the corner. For fans of horror and all thing that go bump in the night this is their favorite time of the year. We thought it would be appropriate to channel our inner Stephen King and share some eCommerce horror stories that will haunt your dreams. All work and no play make the author of this article a dull boy. Read on if you dare, MUHAHAHAHA!
The Tale of Lost Data
Tim’s eCommerce store was on fire! On a typical morning he would wake up and find 20 or more overnight orders. Tim prides himself on providing exceptional customer service. Before entering sales data into his ERP, Tim would answer any customer emails first. To his surprise, he would receive emails that customers received the wrong product or items from their order were missing.
As time went on, Tim’s curiosity grew and grew. He couldn’t understand where these errors were coming from. He decided to get to the bottom of it. Tim went well into the night digging through his sales and comparing them to his records in his ERP. To his horror, Tim noticed that there were discrepancies where wrong products or wrong quantities were entered into the ERP. Tim couldn’t believe he let his customer down. Now those orders will forever haunt his dreams.
The Tale of Vanishing Inventory
Karen runs a high-volume eCommerce store. Her store has 100s of SKUs that are listed on her site. Karen’s marketing team is composed of nothing but all-stars. As a result, every time they send out an email campaign her sales skyrocket. Karen’s team can see the orders populate themselves inside their eCommerce platform. Their products are so popular that they diversified their online presence with a multi-channel strategy.
When it came time to pack orders. Karen noticed her team often didn't have enough product on hand to fulfill all orders. Karen was shocked this was happening since they had an auto inventory ticker on their
Shopify store. Every time someone bought a product it would deduct it from the inventory in Shopify. Karen’s team eagerly audited their sales to see where they were overselling. To their surprise, they discovered that the Shopify inventory counter was not accounting for their multi-channel sales on marketplaces like
Amazon and
Walmart. Now every time a sale comes through, they check their inventory levels in horror worried that they have oversold.
The Tale of Lost Time
Chirs runs an athletic wear brand that in the last couple of months has seen tremendous growth. Currently his team is made up of a scrappy group of people who co-founded the company with him. Each member of the team wears multiple hats throughout the day. They focus on their own work and collectively answer customer emails, pack orders, and track sales. Their online store has been seeing a steady flow of 200 plus orders a month. Chris and his team have recently seen their orders skyrocket well beyond the 200 orders a month mark. But there are other things Chris has noticed too.
His team is now scrambling to accomplish their day to day tasks while managing the logistics of their business. Chris and his teammates have noticed they have a backlog of important tasks such as website updates and social media posts. One week, during their daily standup, Chris wanted to get to the bottom of where their time was being wasted. His fellow co-founders mentioned they needed to get tasks x,y, and z done, but they were swamped with entering orders back and forth between their accounting package and eCommerce platform. Chris is now wished a day had more than 24 hours, and thought, if only there was a way to eliminate manual entry.
The Tale of Slow Shipping
Tina is a sales queen! She has mastered her multi-channel strategy. She’s dominating with her own eCommerce store, Amazon store, and listings on various marketplaces like Walmart. She has strategically located her warehouse operations as close as possible to her manufacturer in order to speed up the fulfillment process. However, she still receives angry emails from Amazon and her customers that her orders are not being shipped in a timely manner. She was almost fined by Amazon for not meeting their shipping standards.
Tina is a diligent person and she started digging through her sales records. She noticed that orders from all platforms would pour in at all hours of the day. Tina’s warehouse team was super diligent. They would reference orders from their ERP, pack them, and ship them. Tina started noticing a pattern that sometimes orders from various channels wouldn’t make it into the ERP until the end of the business day and then wouldn’t be processed by the warehouse until the next day. Tina was also socked to notice that her team was backlogged with manual data entry every morning that would eat up a lot of their productivity. Tina is terrified to check her emails since it might be another one regarding slow shipping.
eBridge Connections Keeps the eCommerce Boogeyman at Bay
We may not be Van Helsing or an exorcist, but eBridge Connections can keep your eCommerce nightmares at bay. Our integration platform enables bi-directional communication between your commerce systems. Merchants with an integration solution from eBridge eliminate the need for manual data entry, free up time to focus on crucial business matters, ship and fulfill orders faster, and get almost instantaneous updates in their commerce systems. With an integrated commerce network:
- Tim can rest assured that all order information will be complete, concise and accurate.
- Karen will always have the right amount of inventory on hand to fulfill all of her orders.
- Chirs and his team will have ample amounts of time to focus on crucial business tasks.
- Tina will not have to worry about backlogs in her shipping department or the possibility of facing heavy fines from different marketplaces.
Discover how your commerce network can
benefit from integration.
eBridge is Your Universal Integration Solution
eBridge Connections has pre-build connectors for all leading
eCommerce platforms like
Shopify,
BigCommerce,
Magento,
WooCommerce. In addition, we support
ERP solutions from
Sage,
Microsoft,
SAP,
NetSuite,
Intuit and many more. Our platform is designed to support your scaling business as your needs change. With the rise of multi-channel our integration platform also supports marketplaces like
Amazon and
Walmart, as well as fulfillment solutions like
Shipstation.
In addition, eBridge is hosted on Microsoft Azure, therefore ensuring an almost 99.9% uptime and industry leading security. With an integration solution from eBridge, you can ensure that your commerce network is connected and communicating data bi-directionally.