E-commerce invoicing is a legal requirement for online sales, just as it is for physical commerce. It must be sent to the customer at the latest upon receipt of the order.
For e-tailers who sell on several sales platforms simultaneously, it’s often synonymous with wasted time. Omnichannel sales mean that they have to go to the back office of each sales source to edit and print their e-commerce invoice. To alleviate this problem, many e-tailers use modules in their CMS to manage e-commerce invoicing for all their sales channels. However, this practice proves unsuccessful in many respects. In this article, we tell you why.
What is a CMS?
The Content Management System (CMS) was originally a content management program used to build e-commerce sites.
Whereas in the past, website creation was reserved for those with a high level of technical expertise, today, thanks to CMS, e-tailers can easily create their own e-commerce site without necessarily having any IT skills. The code is already written for them, so no programming skills are required.
Generally speaking, e-commerce CMS include numerous functionalities, plugins and modules designed for e-commerce activity. Templates are also available, allowing you to customize the design, style and color of your e-commerce site.
How do you manage e-commerce invoicing when you sell on several sales channels simultaneously?
E-commerce invoicing can be a real headache, all the more so when you sell on different sales platforms simultaneously (CMS, Marketplaces, Ventes Privées).
In this case, the first solution for my e-commerce invoicing is to go to each back-office to edit and print my invoices.
For example, if I sell on five websites, and on two different Marketplaces, I’d have no choice but to manage my e-commerce invoices in each back-office of my five websites, as well as in my two Marketplaces back-offices.
This is a huge waste of time, which can be detrimental to the development of your business. Aware of this problem, a number of modules have been developed to enable merchants to retrieve orders from other sales platforms on their CMS.
The CMS is not the right tool for managing your e-commerce billing
“I have a CMS, why should I manage my e-commerce billing with another tool?” That’s a very good question. We’ll try to answer it in this article.
To meet the many needs of e-tailers, namely…
- Enable orders placed on my other sales channel (e.g. on a marketplace) to be redirected.
- Manage shipments and package labels (carriers create their own modules for this purpose)
- Manage billing,
- etc….
Many independent developers have started to create more and more diverse modules dedicated to CMS.
These modules, while suitable for those just starting out in online sales, pose a number of problems, not only in terms of security and reliability, but also and above all in terms of the viability of transaction data.
Indeed, these modules tend to distance the CMS from its primary function: a content management system enabling you to design, manage and modify a product catalog available for sale at your leisure. Originally, it was never intended as a logistics tool for centralizing orders from other sales channels, inventories and shipments, let alone invoicing from other sales sources.
From an IT point of view, this poses a problem of reliability and availability, in the sense that the association of a large number of these modules on a site can cause bugs and slowdowns. It also poses problems in terms of data security – particularly with regard to the RGPD – as CMSs can retrieve orders and information from other sales channels (e.g. a marketplace) via flow managers.
From the point of view of the viability of data useful for billing, this is often degraded or incomplete, and suffers from the use of these cascading technologies, as shown in the diagram below:
In this diagram, we can see that the CMS is not directly connected to the Marketplace, but only via the feed manager.
In terms of invoicing, the problem is that the flow manager doesn’t send the exact order information from the Marketplace to the CMS. In the event of a tax audit, it would be difficult to compare an Amazon order with the order transmitted via the CMS. What’s more, the VAT rate cannot be recovered for all Marketplace sales.
One of the requirements of the authorities is the chronology of e-commerce invoice numbers. Without order centralization software, you won’t be able to ensure that your invoice numbers follow each other, simply because the sales channels don’t communicate with each other, and each has its own, different invoice numbers.
But if it’s not possible to manage my e-commerce invoicing on each of my back-offices, but also on my CMS for all my e-commerce orders, what can I do?
Use appropriate technology connected directly to your sales sources
Only technology that is directly connected to your sales sources will enable you to :
- Centralize orders from all your sales channels,
- Provide accurate, clean and up-to-date transaction information from all your sales channels, simply because the information is retrieved directly from the order source, including :
→ Date on which the PDF of an invoice was generated,
→ Order date on sales source (marketplaces, private sales)
→ Order status,
→ Order number assigned by the order source,
→ Unique sales reference on the sales source,
→ etc…
- Have consecutive e-commerce invoice numbers,
- Respect safety standards, with no additional technology between the tool and your sales source.
In this diagram, we can see that Shippingbo technology is natively connected to sales sources, without any intermediary. This means you can access all your e-commerce order data in a single interface, without any data degradation.
In short, by centralizing your omnichannel orders in real time, Shippingbo standardizes the data from all your sales channels, giving you clean, accurate data ready to be used by your accountants, CRMs, etc.
This saves you a huge amount of time, and ensures that you comply with the expectations of the tax authorities, who often carry out VAT fraud checks.
Conclusion
With Shippingbo’s e-commerce invoicing software, you can manage your e-commerce invoicing with up-to-date, accurate and usable data in just one click! No need to edit your e-commerce invoices on each of your sites, or to hijack the function of your CMS!
Discover in this webinar the 8 mistakes to avoid as an e-merchant:
