– Efficient Order Management

– Advanced Reconciliation Tool
4. Safeguard Your Profits and Let Your Business Thrive!

Imagine taking an exam and finding out that you didn’t score well. And you don’t have any information about where you lost your marks. Losing revenue in an e-commerce business is like that—an unnoticed and unintentional loss of the money you have earned but not coming to your wallet. Every order is a revenue, and the journey of an order from warehouse to delivery decides whether you will get the revenue or lose it. 

You sell on different marketplaces with their respective policies, claims, and rate cards. Once the order is processed, it is constantly exposed to a return. Additionally, you pay different types of platform charges. With so much going on,  how will you be sure you have received it right when there is no picture of your exact reconciliation?  Let’s try to understand the instances of potential profit loss and how to prevent these revenue leakages. 

What Causes Revenue Leakages?

Before understanding the types of leakage and how they can be cured, let’s understand the factors that cause your profits to go into loss. As we said, every order is revenue. We will track an order’s journey and see what goes wrong and the profit gets lost. Let’s examine all the stages of potential revenue loss. 

1. Instances of Revenue Loss Before Order Dispatch

When an order is created, it progresses through various stages. For instance, let’s say there isn’t sufficient inventory due to poor stock management; you will lose your potential profit immediately. Or your warehouse faces inventory overstocking, eating up the storage for the right and locking the inventory, losing your profits. Then, fetching incorrect order details can increase returns and escalate logistics costs. The efficiency of your order management system is crucial in preventing these issues. 

Secondly, various fees are applied when listing your product on multiple marketplaces, and these fees can change according to the platform’s requirements, leading to unexpected increases in costs. For example, if Marketplace A increases its commission fee from 12% to 15% and you miss the notification email, you may only notice the new charges after the 15-day payment cycle. By then, the expenses will have already impacted your revenue expectations, and you can do nothing about it.

2. Instances of Revenue Loss During Order Dispatch

Order fulfillment heavily relies on the picking, packing, and logistics processes. Let’s say you ensured the accuracy of the picking process. But packaging involves costs and has the potential to affect your revenues. A seller decides the shipping charges based on density, volume, or weight with their respective aggregators. 

Billing discrepancies can arise due to different bases for third-party charges—most of the time, the weight increases because of the volumetric weighing process, which regularly impacts the cost. For instance, you sent a product weighing less than 1 kg and were initially charged Rs 100. But when it reached the logistics provider, they charged it based on a weight exceeding 1 kg, resulting in a fee of Rs 150. This discrepancy might be noticed during the billing period, leading to revenue leakage. Such leakages can significantly impact your financial health. 

Differences in weight, volume, unique packaging requirements, shortages of certain packaging materials, etc., can cause these differences. And with each discrepancy, you might lose your hard-earned profits and significantly impact your bottom line. 

3. Instances of Revenue Loss After Order Dispatch

At this stage, your order must be ready to ship and reach its final destination. Once dispatched, the responsibility shifts to your shipping providers. Frequent issues like “lost in transit” or customer-initiated returns can cost you significantly. Many times, returned products are unsellable due to damage or customer dissatisfaction. 

Returns can be for any reason, from the customer receiving the wrong product to not liking or damaging it during transit. Regardless, you lose profits due to the extra logistics costs. And if you are using marketplace-based fulfillment like FBA by Amazon, keeping track of different costs like platform fee, commission fee etc., will be a never-ending task. 

How to Stop and Prevent Revenue Leakage?

Let’s explore how to implement changes at different stages to save all your hard-earned profits. 

1. Complete Visibility of Inventory

Complete visibility of your stock can prevent product leakages in the warehouse, from the inbound process to managing returned inventory. You will easily be able to manage understocking or overstocking and inventory reconciliation. Techniques like stock rotations, forecasting inventory, and handling returns from a single platform can help you protect your profits with greater safety and accuracy.

2. Efficient Order Management

Remember how we discussed that the order fulfillment process heavily depends on picking, packing, and shipping? Accuracy in these stages ensures a smoother process and fewer returns. If your system can fetch the correct information, customize the picklist, and sort packaging using features like image-assisted sorting, this will reduce the cognitive load on the packers. This helps maintain a consistent weight, density, or volumetric slabs for shipping providers, minimizing potential changes by them and increasing the cost that you must be paying unknowingly. 

3. Advanced Reconciliation Tool

You don’t need to worry if you cannot take the measures during the process and the damage has already been done. You can still know it all, and an advanced payment reconciliation system will raise the issue within the timeline. Let’s counter all the issues that we discussed above one by one:

Suppose any of the sales channels you are selling on has increased charges, such as commission fee, platform fee, or any other tax, and you need to be made aware of it. In that case, you can immediately track it with the advanced reconciliation tool. With the exact percentage and digits, all the reports will be just one click away. 

Then, if the marketplace or your warehouse fulfills your orders, the shipping discrepancies can easily be tracked. You don’t need to wait and lose money for a payment cycle like 30 days. The system will raise the dispute like a devoted soldier and you will not lose your profits. 

An advanced tool can protect your profits until the final stop. It allows you to monitor additional return costs from marketplaces or your website. You can compare expected and received payments, see all charges in detail, and understand their impact on your profits. 

Just like albums have a bonus track, here’s a bonus solution for you: imagine being able to track all your returns on their way back to the warehouse. With an advanced tracking solution, you can monitor your product’s journey and ensure your business thrives with full visibility and control.

Safeguard Your Profits and Let Your Business Thrive!

We’ve explored the various stages where revenue can leak. The e-commerce landscape is ever-evolving, and adapting to these changes is crucial for protecting your profits and staying competitive. But how will you keep an eye on it? The answer is by keeping up with the tech! Investing in the right tools is far better than frequently losing revenue and risking your business . So, why wait? Lock and zip your profits and set your business up for success!

More to Explore:

• Why do you need Payment Reconciliation?
• Key Challenges in Reconciling Payments for Marketplaces
• How Marketplace Returns Reconciliation can optimize your Online Selling Experience?

The post What is Revenue Leakage in E-commerce: Causes and Their Solutions appeared first on unicommerce.com.

• Introduction
• Understanding Marketplace Payment Reconciliation 
• Role of Automation in E-commerce Payment Reconciliation

1. 1. 1. Prevents Revenue Leakages 
      2. Real-time Custom Reports
      3. Seamless Multi-channel Integrations
      4. Identification of Negative Cash Flows

• Let’s Reconcile Marketplace Payments Easily!

In today’s e-commerce ecosystem, every business and seller wants to make their products available on every marketplace. But managing sales and transactions across these selling channels is not as easy as it sounds. 

Every click, swipe, and purchase generates a number of financial activities that need to be tracked and reconciled. 

While selling on marketplaces like Amazon, Flipkart, or Myntra, there are many things you have to track, including their policies, returns, reimbursements, claims, and much more. With so much going on, how can you be sure you’re getting 100% of the payments you’re owed? 

Let’s dive deeper into the marketplace payment reconciliation concept to find the answer!

Understanding Marketplace Payment Reconciliation

Marketplaces usually release payments within 10-15 days after deducting their commission and other fees. Many sellers often lack the time to check every order to see if they’ve received the correct payment. 

Even though marketplaces like Amazon send summary emails, a lot can happen afterward, like returns or claims for damages. For example, you might expect 500 rupees for an order but only get 300 rupees due to various deductions. These mismatches can really add up. And we are well aware that inaccurate tracking of these transactions can chip away at your profits faster than you realize.

So, what’s the solution to this challenge?

That’s where marketplace payment reconciliation comes into the picture. This process ensures that you reconcile what you expect to receive with what actually lands in your account. By systematically comparing marketplace records with your own sales data, you can identify discrepancies early on. 

This not only helps catch errors like underpayments but also allows you to track the health of your e-commerce business more accurately. Manually managing these tasks is incredibly tedious, which is where automation steps in to streamline the process. 

So, let’s understand how automation and technology are transforming the payment reconciliation process. 

Role of Automation in E-commerce Payment Reconciliation

• Prevents Revenue Leakages
• Real-time Custom Reports
• Seamless Multi-channel Integrations
• Identification of Negative Cashflows

Thanks to technology, every aspect of e-commerce is becoming automated, and reconciliation tools are leading the charge. These automated tools use advanced algorithms to instantly match orders, payments, and returns across various online platforms, giving sellers a clear, up-to-date view of their financial status.

Some of these tools even use a maker-checker mechanism: one part fetches data from marketplaces (the makers), while another verifies and validates it (the checkers). This setup helps sellers challenge any questionable charges levied by marketplaces.

Here are the benefits of using automated tools for marketplace payment reconciliation:

1. Prevents Revenue Leakages 

Firstly, automated tools prevent revenue leakages by swiftly identifying and addressing financial discrepancies. They detect issues such as shipping overcharges, commission discrepancies, missing inventory, and losses from damaged returns. By promptly flagging these discrepancies, sellers can ensure that they receive accurate payments for every transaction.

2. Real-time Custom Reports

Real-time custom data reports that help them identify trends, analyze performance, and optimize operations. For example, with these reports, you can easily track discrepancies in commission fees across different marketplaces, monitor patterns of missing or damaged returns, and evaluate shipping costs.

3. Seamless Multi-channel Integrations

Modern automated tools are designed to seamlessly integrate with major marketplaces such as Amazon, Flipkart, and Myntra, among others. This integration consolidates multi-channel sales management into a single platform, providing a unified view of all transactions and financial data.

4. Identification of Negative Cashflows

Negative cash flows can majorly impact your brand’s profitability and overall financial health. Advanced reconciliation tools help you spot these issues early by providing detailed analysis and insights into your cash flow patterns. For example, if you notice that returns and refunds are draining your cash, these tools can analyze the data to determine the actual root cause and take corrective action. 

Let’s Reconcile Marketplace Payments Easily!

As technology continues to advance, staying ahead in the market demands that sellers keep a keen eye on emerging trends. It’s also crucial to choose the right tools tailored to your business needs while dealing with the challenges of payment reconciliation. 

UniReco, our innovative cloud-based solution, is designed precisely for this purpose. It empowers sellers to track expected and actual sales across major marketplaces like Myntra, Amazon, and Flipkart.

With UniReco, managing financial transactions becomes efficient and transparent, ultimately helping e-commerce businesses thrive in the competitive e-commerce landscape. 

So what are you waiting for? Embrace UniReco today!

Suggested read:

• What is E-commerce Payment Reconciliation?
• Benefits of Returns Reconciliation for Online Sellers
• Benefits of Marketplace Payment Reconciliation
• How to Sell Products Online on Meesho?

The post How Automation and Technology is Revolutionizing Marketplace Payment Reconciliation in E-commerce appeared first on unicommerce.com.

After that, dealing with the issue being raised is a different trail of tasks. For any e-commerce business, all of these factors play a vital role because this is what sets the line between going to a loss or earning profits. That’s where the e-commerce payment reconciliation comes in, with its regular optimization and tracking of trends and patterns, it ensures an automated process of reconciliations. 

Let’s dive more into how an e-commerce payment reconciliation solution is capable of making it all seamless!

Why Do You Need Payment Reconciliation?

Imagine this scenario, let’s say you sell on different marketplaces. Platforms like Amazon, Flipkart, and Meesho release their payments in the settlement cycle of 7 days while Myntra has a cycle of 15 days and Blinkit repeats the payment in 10-15 days. When you do an e-commerce business everyday issues are inevitable like the difference between expected and received payments, overcharges by logistics, reverse packing or returns, the discrepancy in payments, problems with gateway charges, and operational leakages. The difference lies in how you deal with it. Let’s explore these possibilities. 

Let’s say you have hired people and they maintain the records of everything. Now, how many Excel sheets are too many Excel sheets?  And how much of the workforce will be required to do these collar jobs? Will they have the capacity to deal with each discrepancy that will be there regularly and every overcharge that will be charged and keep the follow-up from everywhere until it’s resolved? Imagining the extreme, they can do this. 

However, the time it takes to get resolved will never be able to fit the timeline of different e-commerce marketplaces. By the time they can resolve something, the problem will become too old and there will be a fresh bundle to deal with. This will not go anywhere but, towards loss. And the room for human error seems inevitable in all of this. The fact is this is not a human cup of tea. 

Why E-commerce Payment Reconciliation Matters for Businesses – Top Benefits

1. Financial Accuracy:  Accurate data is the cornerstone of selling. What has gone, and what is expected to come, and what is disputed, all these are portrayed by the numbers. If payment reconciliation is a kite then it is held by the string called reports of accurate numbers that makes your business fly.  You can get all the numbers in the form of reports and optimization is done regularly if the right tool is used. 

2. Faster Settlements: It was not a lie when we were told that time is money. Hence saving time in countering the disputes, and manually handling the overdue and awaited payments is what can be done easily. Just a few clicks away to know it all! Invest in the right automated payment reconciliation tool that gives you real-time information. For instance, a payment reconciliation tool that updates the information in just a few minutes and accesses the data, gives customized reports, just the way you want.  It ensures the factor of transparency whenever you would like to raise an issue against any disputes like overcharges by logistics or discrepancies in the amount received from the marketplace.

3. Standardize the Process: By standardizing and adopting a payment reconciliation system, not only will you unlock the accuracy, but it also will minimize the risk of financial and operational leakages as well as ensure financial integrity. 

You will have recorded data with detailed financial insights that will project the charges in detail and it will be 10 times easier to identify the issue with the proven number by your side. The chances for human- error or fraudulent and financial leakages gradually diminish with the standardization. Brought by the regular real-time, automated reports which makes it very handy to analyze and strategize. 

What are the Best Practices for Handling E-commerce Payment Reconciliations?

1. Automation: We live in the era of clicking the solutions and resolving disputes. The automation has the potential to solve operational issues in seconds with a few clicks. Automate most of your business operations by investing in the right technology. Your system can become capable of knowing every bit of difference between the expected and actual payment received, why it happened, each overcharge that is applied, and every inventory that went missing, and you can raise against the dispute in seconds, fitting to the time-crunch perfectly, that too for all the touchpoints that you are selling at. Isn’t it great?  You can know the earliest when there’s a negative cash flow. The earlier it can be countered the lesser the potential of loss becomes. You can have it all in your control!

2. Regular Monitoring: When any problem occurs in the smooth functioning of your business, how do we recognize it? Most of the time, it is by observing the trends that happened in your business recently. Let’s take a look at an example, a reputed brand was receiving a lot of fake returns in the curtain of their buy one get one scheme. When the number intensified in a regular manner that’s when it was possible to stop the flow of loss. Now, imagine getting this as an automated report at the earliest. Does it solve it right away? The answer is yes!  Be a step ahead of the numbers and to that, seamless payment reconciliation systems are the stairs that will help you to take that step ahead!

3. Review and Improve the Process: Problems like operational leakages are inevitable in the financial processes. One of the best practices to avoid and minimize the discrepancies is to review. To review the reports and improve the process by using an advanced e-commerce payment reconciliation tool.

There’s no point in monitoring and keeping a check if we are not getting the reports for analysis. Real-time custom data reports are very essential to identifying trends and optimizing the operations and performances.

Redefine E-commerce Payment Reconciliation Excellence!

It’s a necessity in the e-commerce business to evolve technologically and not get stuck in the loophole of constant issues. Handling e-commerce payment reconciliation is like solving several puzzles, say 10 at one time in the limited time given to you. The only way that a human would do it is by solving it one by one. An advanced payment reconciliation tool will solve it all for you and support you by giving accurate reports, even finding the parts of the puzzles that are missing in detail. 

Be a part of the payment reconciliation revolution and unlock customer satisfaction with the best strategies. Don’t settle for the ordinary, when you can unleash e-commerce excellence with efficient and amazing tools like UniReco. It’s time to embrace smart selling and unleash the full potential of your business. 

Related read:

• How E-commerce Marketplace Payment Reconciliation helps E-commerce Businesses?
• How Shipping Notifications Can Benefit E-commerce Business?
• Streamlined E-commerce Payment Reconciliation with UniReco
• What is NDR Management?

The post What is E-commerce Payment Reconciliation? Importance & Best Practices appeared first on unicommerce.com.