Open topic with navigation

Understanding FBA Data Synchronization

Monsoon Marketplace has several features that refresh your Fulfillment by Amazon (FBA) data to help minimize the chance that your listings become out of sync with available quantity.

FBA Sync

The FBA Sync feature periodically downloads all of your available FBA data at Amazon and synchronizes your SKU quantities in Monsoon Marketplace to match those reported by Amazon. The FBA Sync runs frequently and will affect any FBA item that has changed at Amazon. This helps minimize likelihood of your data becoming out of sync.

If you sell an FBA item, the available quantity for that item will automatically be decremented in Monsoon Marketplace. If Amazon receives additional quantity of an item, your available quantity in Monsoon Marketplace is adjusted to match the available quantity reported by Amazon.

Enhanced FBA Synchronization

In addition, after you create an FBA shipment directly on Amazon, Monsoon Marketplace synchronizes your in-transit inventory through Enhanced FBA Synchronization. Using FBA Sync, Monsoon Marketplace verifies and updates FBA SKU quantities from information provided by Amazon. Monsoon Marketplace also detects and creates any FBA SKUs that you create directly on Amazon.

Enhanced FBA Synchronization adds to these processes by providing FBA sellers who use Amazon's Distributed Inventory Placement the flexibility to create shipments directly on Amazon. (For more information about Distributed Inventory Placement, see the Amazon website.) Distributed Inventory Placement is Amazon's default option for FBA inventory shipments.

Enhanced FBA Synchronization begins as soon as a shipment is created outside of Monsoon Marketplace and you ship it to Amazon. When Amazon reports that a shipment is in transit, but the shipment does not exist in Monsoon Marketplace, synchronization creates the FBA shipment in Monsoon Marketplace with a status of Sent. When you complete a shipment on Amazon, Amazon changes the status of the shipment to In Transit. Synchronization processes each item in the shipment and retrieves information about an item's Merchant SKU, FNSKU, and quantity shipped.

FBA Listing Hold

FBA Listing Hold was developed as part of Enhanced FBA Synchronization give you more control over how and when an FBA shipment item lists on the marketplace. After you create and ship an FBA shipment directly on Amazon, but before the shipment is received at a Fulfillment Center, an automatic FBA listing hold is placed on:

There are three SKU scenarios where FBA Listing Hold is applied:

1. When a SKU exists in Monsoon Marketplace with a quantity greater than 0, the SKU is updated with an FBA shipment item number. If the SKU has never been sold as an FBA item before, an FBA location is added to the SKU. You can view the shipment item number, status, and shipment quantity of the synchronized SKU on the My Inventory tab by clicking the FBA Working Qty ellipsis (...) button.

2. When a SKU exists in Monsoon Marketplace with a quantity of 0, the SKU is updated with an FBA shipment item number. An FBA listing hold is also automatically placed on the item. If the SKU has never been sold as an FBA item before, an FBA location is added to the SKU.You can view the listing hold flag on the My Inventory tab.

   

3. When you create a SKU on Amazon and then add that SKU to an FBA shipment created on Amazon, the SKU is synchronized with Monsoon Marketplace if it does not have a MON prefix or a _usf, _ukf, _loc, or _sqz suffix.When a SKU created on Amazon is synchronized with Monsoon Marketplace, the SKU is created in Monsoon Marketplace and placed on FBA listing hold.

Items with a check mark in the FBA Listing Hold check box will not list until you remove the hold. (You should regularly check for FBA listing hold items to confirm that your preferred pricing settings are in place.) Before you release an FBA shipment item's FBA listing hold, to allow the item to list, you can customize the following settings:

• Set a SKU's pricing strategy.
• Set a SKU's cost of goods.
• Apply a custom classification to each SKU. (For more information, see To add or remove a classification or classification note.)

When you customize your settings, you can position your SKUs to sell at a profit margin that best fits your business needs.

To remove the FBA listing hold, you can:

• Remove the hold one SKU at a time or through a bulk edit on the My Inventory tab. (For more information, see To bulk edit an FBA listing hold.)
• Import an inventory file into Monsoon Marketplace that contains the column header FBAListingHold with a column value of False. (For more information, see To create an inventory import file in Excel.)

See also

• Managing Inventory for FBA
• Using FBA
• Understanding FBA

©2016 Monsoon, Inc. All rights reserved.