The Avasam update: January 2021

We’re already in the swing of things for the new year here at Avasam, and we’re starting 2021 as we mean to go on, by announcing improvements we’ve been working on while you’ve been busy making sales in Q4. We’ve undertaken a update to the platform this time and we’ve also been sorting bugs behind the scenes.

Without boring you about all the technical details, here is an overview of the important new features:

New Shopify listing functionality

Listing on sales channels is a task that takes up a lot of time for online sellers, but that is no longer the case for our Shopify users. We have created a listing tool allowing you to list the products you have sourced from Avasam directly to your Shopify store at the click of a button. All the product information, such as images, title, description and attributes will appear in your Shopify store automatically.

You’ll also see sync logs in this section, which allows you to see whether there is an issue with any of your listings – helping you to manage your listings more efficiently.

We know that you also want this functionality for other sales channels and don’t worry, we are hard at work to deliver this. Each channel is different and takes time to develop but we are on the case.

Listing manager

Over time, this will become your control panel for managing sales channels and will increase capacity for power sellers. We’ve built extensive features here to provide SKU and shipping mapping, and you’ll also have the ability to run price and stock updates. You’ll also see sync logs in this section for orders, prices, and stock, which will help you identify any issues and allow you to manage your business more efficiently. You’ll see the time that syncs occurred, and if there is an issue that prevents a sync from occurring, you’ll be able to test and reauthorise the channel, or to contact Avasam support if necessary.

New homepage

Going forward, you will land on our new homepage each time you login to Avasam. Here you will find important information such as announcements about special product promotions, vacation or shutdown periods for our suppliers, any technical problems or new features related to the platform, or new products and suppliers that have come onboard. You will also see display cards showing a number of preset product search filters that will take you directly to that group of products within our catalogue as well as all of our latest help videos.

Changes to product search functionality

To help you find products more efficiently, we’ve made changes to the search functionality within the platform. The catalogue page has a completely new structure, with free text search capabilities, smart filters, and sort functions to help you narrow down products that you want to source more effectively. We think you’ll find it pretty intuitive, since it is in line with the sort of search capability that you get on marketplaces and other platforms.

Bulk product sourcing

For those of you not wishing you use our CSV file export functionality, you can now bulk source products from the catalogue page by simply multi-selecting them, which should make things much simpler when you’re browsing for new products to add to your inventory.

New SKU mapping screen

We know many Avasam power sellers are looking to take a multichannel approach to their selling, and with that in mind, we knew we needed to improve the way in which products were handled. From this update, you’ll be able to manage products with variations better, and have an overview of what is being sold and on which sales channels.

We’ve completely reworked the SKU mapping functionality to make it better for sellers and to allow better management of multichannel selling. Sellers can use filters to help see which SKUs are mapped or unmapped, both on Avasam’s side and on the sales channels, and you’ll be able to unlink SKUs and mapping, which will allow for easier redoing of, or removal of listings. If you’re a regular user of the automap function, don’t worry – it is still available in the dropdown menu in the top right hand corner, alongside functions such as resync stock and price for any newly mapped SKUs.

Ticket system enhancement

When you’re contacting our customer service team or your suppliers, you want to know how things are progressing. With this update, we’ve made it much clearer to see where there have been updates to your tickets, what status the enquiry has and so on.

While our suppliers have always been required to respond to your tickets within 24 hours on business days, we are aware that has not always been happening. We have therefore also made improvements to the supplier side of the ticket system to make it clearer what tickets require actioning and which are overdue.

Order cancellations functionality & partial refunds

Whenever a supplier wishes to cancel an order, they will now have to select a reason for doing so and you will be informed of this. We will also be recording and monitoring this going forward so that we can work with them to improve order cancellation rates and also build this into our planned supplier performance dashboard that is coming soon.

Suppliers will also be able to issue partial refunds to sellers in order to compensate them when something small has gone wrong with an order but that does not justify cancelling and returning the whole order. Hopefully this will help you and your suppliers resolve small order related problems quickly and easily.

Variation products

Many products are what we call variant or variation products, meaning they are related to other products but differentiated only by size and / or colour. We have made enhancements to our back-end catalogue to now group all related variant products within single listings rather than display them all individually.

This will not only improve your catalogue browsing experience but also make the sourcing and listing of these related products much easier – you can now source them all in one go, and for our Shopify users, list them automatically in one go also (as outlined above).

You can identify the variant products with variations by the inclusion of a small blue layering icon in the bottom right hand corner of the catalogue page.

Additional shipping price for certain products

For some products – particularly low-cost products – the cost of shipping makes it impossible to make a profit on the items. We’ve made changes to the way shipping costs can be applied, making it possible for sellers and suppliers to benefit from sales of low-cost items.

eBay Global Shipping programme

Where suppliers are able to dispatch orders to overseas customers, sellers want to be able to make the most of this by using the eBay Global Shipping programme. With this in mind, we’ve made it easier for sellers to make use of the eBay Global Shipping programme, which opens up the possibility of sales on international eBay marketplaces where suppliers can fulfil these orders.