Quality despite quantity: How to manage the data volumes of your cross-border multichannel retail in a legally compliant manner

Multichannel commerce brings both opportunities and challenges: As a retailer in eCommerce, you are faced with the task of maintaining your brand presence across different sales channels, while at the same time having to master the complexity of inventory management, pricing and logistics. In this article, we take a look at the importance of data quality in multichannel retail and show you how you can successfully master these challenges with JTL and countX.

Your strategy for more growth

With solutions such as JTL-eazyAuction, it is very easy to manage sales via different marketplaces at the same time. Thanks to the seamless integration with your ERP, all transactions on Amazon, eBay and other marketplaces can be managed centrally and efficiently. Regardless of your marketplace interface, there are various aspects to consider in order to set up your multichannel retail business for the long term. We have compiled the most important ones for you:

• Consistency in brand presence: As soon as you offer your goods on different platforms, you should ensure a consistent brand presence. This creates trust, increases the credibility of your brand and strengthens your brand identity.
• Inventory and warehouse management: Managing inventory and, in particular, coordinating stock levels across different sales channels can be complex. With a warehouse management system like JTL-WMS, you can keep an eye on everything and ensure that all ordered products are available on time and bottlenecks are avoided.
• Logistics and shipping: The topic of logistics and shipping naturally increases as soon as you use multiple sales channels. JTL-WMS also supports you here in combination with JTL-Shipping, allowing you to carry out and automate shipping processes smoothly.
• Pricing: In multichannel retail, it can make sense to offer your products at different prices for each sales channel – depending on the potential of the channels and the competitive environment. You should also take into account the different cost structures on the various platforms. Platform and transaction fees as well as shipping costs can vary and ultimately influence your margins.
• Customer service and support: As soon as you expand your sales channels and transactions increase, customer inquiries will also increase. Customer relationship management (CRM) such as GREYHOUND can be helpful in dealing with these and establishing efficient processes.
• Data integration and analysis: In a fast-moving industry such as eCommerce, it is important that your business model is scalable. The basis for this is data quality as a first step. The increased data flow should be carefully analyzed so that you can assess your business decisions retrospectively and make them based on key figures in the future.

Data quality as the key to success in multichannel retail

In multichannel retail, it is becoming increasingly important to maintain an overview of all relevant data as the number of data sources increases. For example, every Amazon seller knows the problems of order creation or activation of the VAT Calculation Service (VCS). This is where we at countX come in: As experts in simplifying and optimizing tax processes in eCommerce, we place particular emphasis on data quality and consistency.

In the countX customer portal, so-called “Health and Plausibility Checks” are carried out, which check your receipt data for VAT correctness independently of the marketplace. This means that the document must match the transaction. The devil is in the detail here, especially with thousands of monthly transactions and different data sources. Any errors found are displayed directly and can be downloaded as an Excel list. After the correction, you simply upload the file again so that your advance VAT return is created on the basis of valid data.

After checking your invoices, you will find the entire outgoing invoice book – and therefore your collected multichannel sales – in your customer portal. You can query these for your desired period, which allows you to read out the total turnover from all marketplaces within a specific period. It is also possible to filter for transactions that are relevant for the OSS process. You can make this processed data available to your tax advisor. With countX, your data is accurate and reliable – even in a complex multichannel environment.

You can delve even deeper into the topic of data quality via this blog post on the countX website: European VAT Compliance – Data quality is key (countx.com)

Influence on the OSS procedure in international trade

As soon as you internationalize your multichannel trade and carry out transactions within the EU, the processing of the OSS procedure is also affected by data quality. Regardless of the down payment of transactions and marketplaces, it is important to ensure that every single invoice is issued correctly. This is the basis on which the OSS procedure is calculated and your VAT is paid.

It gets tricky if there is not just one central warehouse within a national border, as this increases the number of cross-border transactions. If, for example, you use Amazon’s PAN-EU program or an additional fulfilment provider abroad, then some special features must be taken into account in the OSS process.

You can read more about this in this article:

Take your chance now

Despite the aforementioned challenges of multichannel retail, there is great potential waiting for you here. As long as you have strong partners like JTL and countX at your side, nothing stands in the way of your success!