Interview with Emanuele Serra CEO of EMODI:
How I optimized my business selling on Amazon with ZonWizard, cutting over 10 days of work per month.
The company was founded in 2012 and was engaged in business services. Then in 2017 I started stepping into the world of e-commerce by selling on eBay, on our website and then on Amazon which is the marketplace we focused the most on because it offered more possibilities... even though it is much more complex. Then, in 2018 we started growing steadily up to our current sales volume, with 25-30,000 units per month and a growth rate of about 20% per year.
We are specialized retailers on Amazon throughout Europe. We buy goods from Italian and foreign suppliers and resell them on our channels. We have fiscal positions in all Pan-European countries. Currently there are 7 of us and Amazon is undoubtedly our main channel, but we are also present on ebay and our own ecommerce sites. The branch related to business services has down-sized to make room for the strong growth on Amazon.
To sell on Amazon as a retailer you need to know your products well. Amazon customers storm you with questions, and to answer them promptly you need a strong partnership with the supplier who knows the products very well.
Only with strong partnerships with suppliers can you change categories often so you don't put all your eggs in one basket and have the usual flare-up that goes out immediately.
That is why we are always looking for new suppliers with whom we can forge lasting relationships. After Covid this is increasingly important as purchasing conditions have worsened.
Well...managing the relationship with the tax authorities all over Europe is complex. You have to get yourself a good accountant for returns and as well as a good international lawyer for future tax audits, that come in punctually from abroad.
In the beginning, one of the big problems was that we didn’t have a good way to generate tax documents. At the time we did it using complex filters and cross-referencing to figure out where shipments were leaving from and arriving to and to divide invoiced orders from uninvoiced ones.
Even though we have a stong IT background, it used to take us 4-5 days of work per month to process all the transactions correctly. Not to mention the various checks to make sure everything was correct. With the Accounting Tool of ZonWizard we totally cut that stuff out, since the software provides ready-made reports for all tax purposes, so basically we optimized 5 days of operation time within the company.
of work per month required to properly process all tax documents
In 5 minutes, I can extract the cash register, OSS, receipts, invoices, and VAT reports.
The other big difficulty is the liquidity of low-margin retailers. You have to stockpile products and so you need to pay in advance. So you have to necessarily work on optimization and maximizing marginality.
Calculating the real margin on Amazon is very very complex, and having a tool like Zonwizard's Profit Table allows you to immediatly see profit trends of your products, brands and categories.
Along with the Product View it's an essential tool to keep marginality in check.
It allows us to constantly monitor how our individual products are doing. We use it to identify the products that are losing margin, or to find incorrenct pricing, and with this information we make an assessment and study the intervention strategy. Even just identifying a product in a particular market that has low margin is not at all easy to do without ZonWizard.
My idea stemmed from the need to speed up marginality check for newly listed product. Before, I had to go into the product view and check each item on each markeplace to identify any margin-related issues.
To speed up this process I asked if I could have a filter for low marginality and a downloadable report in excel that I could work on. And I am grateful that you have implemented it quickly.
Now I get the export in excel format in 1 minute and I can work on it massively.
With this automatic report I can optimize the work and have more time to spend on analysis.
of work required per month to manually check the marginality of each item for each marketplace
I quickly extract marginality reports, work massively, and avoid manual checks
The Inventory View is useful and immediate. It allows you to prevent one of the mistakes of selling on Amazon, stock breakage.
We use it to forecast when products will be running out of stock and to estimate the optimal reorder quantity, so we can make arrangements with the suppliers in a timely manner.
ZonWizard also sends us low stock notifications for the products that need to be reordered soon. This saves us 2-3 days by eliminating another manual check of sales velocity and stock level for every product on our inventory.
to check sales velocity and stock levels on a daily basis to arrange the product reorder with the supplier
After setting the supply parameters, notifications will automatically alert you of products and quantities to be reorder
For the time being, the idea is to diversify because focusing only on Amazon makes for entrepreneurial fragility...let's not forget the ever-tightening regulations, sudden blockages, falling margins (for us -4%), new EPR costs, and the ever-present competition that always damages the market...
In conclusion we want to consolidate and optimize all our business on Amazon, in order to get the most out of it also thanks to ZonWizard. At the same time we also want to grow our ecommerce and get back to developing the business services part,too.
Thanks to you for having helped me save over 10 days of tedious work per month (hehehe!) since I started using ZonWizard. Have a great day and see you soon.
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