By our partner Synder
When your online business is blooming, it’s only natural to want to expand. E-commerce gives you the opportunity to enter various marketplaces right from your laptop.
But, what sometimes stops sellers from venturing further is the overwhelming complexity of multichannel selling—the inventory synchronization between stores, order fulfillment from different storage locations, payment processing, and multichannel reconciliation. Oh, and let’s not forget the fees and taxes.
It’s undeniable that multichannel selling is as complicated as it gets but luckily, technology can automate these processes almost entirely. The Cin7 Core-Synder integration covers all aspects of multichannel e-commerce giving sellers the freedom and confidence to grow their sales and even reach for new marketplaces.
In this article, we will show you how Cin7 Core-Synder integration works for multichannel e-commerce sellers, using practical and real-world examples.
To understand the challenges and solutions to multichannel selling, we’ll need a vivid case. Let’s take the customer our team onboarded last month as an example.
This business owner successfully sells products on two platforms: Faire and Shopify. It’s a clever setup as Faire is a wholesale marketplace (B2B) while Shopify is geared more toward individual consumers (B2C). These two models can successfully operate side by side, functioning as a single business in terms of financials. That’s what’s great about e-commerce—endless possibilities!
Both on Faire and Shopify, buyers can use standard payment methods like credit and debit cards. Since the business owner wanted to add more convenience to their Shopify store, they decided to offer a PayPal payment option as well.
The selling process in terms of this setup looks simple:
But that’s how it only appears from the outside. As an online seller yourself, you know we’re barely scratching the surface. So let’s see what it’s really like.
The multichannel model isn’t linear but consists of feedback loops that allow it to run smoothly when adequately automated and synchronized. And that’s when Cin7 Core and Synder come in.
Let’s tease out these different parts of the seller’s business setup to illustrate how this integration works. However, Cin7 Core and Synder operate with a host of other sales channels, payment processors, and platforms. So, do check our integration pages for more information.
Every sale starts with a product. Where and how the business stores the goods matters a lot. The seller distributed products nationwide for financial and logistical reasons and with Cin7 Core’s synchronization and automation inventory was managed smoothly.
When a consumer buys goods from our merchant on Faire, here’s what happens:
All in all, with Cin7 Core, the perpetual feedback loops between the warehouses and sales channels ensure that stock is adequately reflected in the entire system. Plus, the seller can manage inventory levels to avoid overstocking and ensure they never run out of products to sell.
While the buyers get to see payment methods (Visa or Mastercard credit card, for example), the seller has to deal with payment systems. In our customer’s multichannel setup, there are in fact three different payment processors:
For the seller, this posed some issues:
That’s why, like inventory, synchronization between platforms is a must. This is where Synder steps in.
Due to large sales volumes, our seller is now using Synder’s Summary sync which details all the day’s transactions per each platform (i.e. Faire, Shopify, and PayPal). The sales and fees can be categorized in any way necessary, while money is reconciled on clearing accounts for the platforms. This way, the summary can then be posted to their accounting as a single journal entry to keep the books clutter-free.
It’s not only what sellers get into their account that they need to record, but also what’s taken out—we’re talking fees. In some countries like Canada or the UE, for example, there are even taxes on service fees.
For our client, the major problem with fees was that they’re deducted at the stage of a payment system so they rely on Shopify, Faire, and PayPal to tell them what was being taken and when. However, combing through platform statements for fee information is simply not scalable, especially for large sales volumes.
That’s why Synder, through its direct integration with Shopify, Faire, and PayPal, gets all this information in real-time and syncs it into the accounting system. The same applies to taxes on service fees: if in the country of operation such taxes are collected, Synder allocates them into the chosen account.
N.B. Large marketplaces like Amazon or Walmart are tasked in some states and countries with the collection and remittance of taxes on behalf of the seller. Synder accounts for these withheld taxes as well.
For the seller, order fulfillment can’t be overstated. Apart from the quality of the actual product, it’s the delivery that plays a major part in customer satisfaction. A great product delivered too late can easily become a disappointing experience for customers—that’s how much power order fulfillment has.
With multiple storage locations and our Shopify-Faire setup, the seller needed to synchronize the sales platforms with warehouses for swift order fulfillment. This multi-step process is automated by Cin7 Core software in the following ways:
With Cin7 Core, the seller has this complex process automated. Regardless of where each item is being stored, the software manages the full product movement from the warehouse to the customer.
Once sales are made and recorded, there comes a time for monthly reconciliation.
There are different ways the seller can reconcile the sales, but generally the best approach is per-platform reconciliation. Accountants often recommend this method because each clearing account tracks the balance and transactions of a particular payment system, making reconciliation much clearer and simpler. This means that orders coming through Faire, Shopify Payments, and PayPal should be reconciled separately.
Wondering how Synder helped the seller here? As Synder created a clearing account for each connected platform, it transferred there all order information, including payment data, fees, payouts, refunds, etc. This ensured that the clearing account contained all necessary pre-matched data, ready for one-click reconciliation.
The same logic applies to all other platforms used for payment processing like Stripe, Square, or Amazon: businesses take advantage of the same robust process of clearing accounts and one-click reconciliation.
The numbers in the books do more than just record and track financials—they tell a story about the business’s profitability.
With Cin7 Core’s accurate calculations of COGS (direct costs associated with the sold products) and landed costs (all costs that land the product at a customer’s doors), our Faire-Shopify seller is now able to understand how much is actually spent on product-related operations.
On the service side of costs, hidden fees and charges get unearthed through Synder’s direct integration with connected platforms allowing for a transparent view of these expenses.
Both types of costs are then compared to the gross sales from all channels to assess the profitability, which gives answers to these vital questions: What products have the highest profit margins? Which platform takes the heftiest amount of fees? Is the net profit substantial enough to expand to other markets?
The Cin7 Core-Synder solution is all you need for these questions to be successfully answered. And it’s the close integration and feedback loops between Cin7 Core and Synder that allow for this unified view of costs and profitability across the entire product-to-sale funnel.
Managing a multichannel e-commerce business can be almost fully automated by the Cin7 Core-Synder integration, as they both support a huge variety of platforms. Synchronizing product, order, and transaction data means that the business works as a unified system rather than a patchwork of disconnected elements.
That’s why the seller can be confident that:
The entire operations part can be easily automated by Cin7 Core-Synder integration, regardless of the number of platforms connected. This confidence lets the seller focus on increasing sales and exploring new opportunities like scaling their business to other marketplaces such as Amazon, Etsy, or eBay.
