Amazon FBA and Seko
Integration Agency & Consultants
Operational drag usually surfaces when Amazon sales volume outpaces the manual checks between Seller Central and Seko. Discrepancies between marketplace orders and real-time warehouse stock lead to overselling or delayed fulfilment, which directly impacts your Amazon seller rating. Cogent2 builds a direct connection between these systems to ensure inventory accuracy and cleaner month-end reporting. We replace manual data re-entry with a stable link that protects your marketplace standing as you scale.
Auditing inventory workflows and data accuracy
We connect your Amazon FBA and Seko integrations quickly, supporting your Marketplaces and WMS/3PL operations. Our consulting services are invaluable, with our system audit services enabling both our consultants and your team to identify and address inefficiencies across Amazon FBA, Seko, Marketplaces, and WMS/3PL. This ensures your tech ecosystem runs efficiently, so you can deliver a great customer experience. Our audits provide actionable insights, empowering you to optimise processes and maintain smooth operations as your business grows.
Solution Design
Architecting Amazon FBA and Seko requires a clear stance on inventory ownership. In most implementations, Seko acts as the source of truth for stock levels, pushing availability to Amazon on a defined schedule. We typically prioritise stable batch updates over real-time synchronisation to prevent data drift during high-volume periods. This trade-off ensures the operations team can rely on Seko for fulfilment while finance maintains accurate records for reconciliation without the risk of over-selling on the marketplace. The design focuses on ensuring Amazon sales data and Seko dispatch records remain consistent for month-end reporting. This operating model gives the business control over stock allocation while meeting Amazon’s strict marketplace requirements.
Synchronising order flow and inventory levels
The integration synchronises Amazon FBA orders with Seko to manage marketplace demand. Seko acts as the source of truth for physical inventory, pushing available-to-sell levels to Amazon on a defined schedule to protect your seller rating. Merchant-fulfilled orders flow from Amazon to Seko to initiate picking and packing, with fulfilment status and tracking information returning once confirmed. This sequencing ensures that stock allocations in Seko stay in step with Amazon sales. The system includes early detection for sync delays or data mismatches, keeping the order-to-dispatch cycle stable during peak trading.
Orchestration using secure integration platforms
Leveraging IPaaS with ISO 27001 and SOC 2 and above security accreditations enables secure, efficient integration between Amazon FBA, Seko, Marketplaces, and WMS/3PL systems. This approach simplifies connecting Amazon FBA and Seko to Marketplaces and WMS/3PL, ensuring data integrity and compliance. IPaaS platforms reduce manual effort, support scalability, and provide robust security, making complex integrations straightforward and reliable.
Monitoring the order to dispatch cycle
Visibility is defined by operational health, not just system uptime. It is the certainty that every Amazon order has reached Seko and that inventory levels in Seller Central match the physical stock on the warehouse floor. We focus on surfacing hidden sync issues or mapping errors before they result in stockouts or shipment delays. Instead of generic dashboards, we provide visibility into the order-to-dispatch cycle, ensuring marketplace promises are backed by warehouse reality.
Transferring operational ownership to your team
Handover prepares finance, ecommerce, and operations teams to own the Amazon FBA and Seko operating model. We define who owns specific tasks, such as resolving inventory discrepancies, processing unmapped SKUs, and monitoring order flow alerts. Teams learn to interpret integration alerts and manage daily exceptions before they impact marketplace metrics. Finance is shown how to verify that Amazon Settlement Reports align with Seko fulfilment records for accurate month-end close. Documentation is provided as a practical operational reference, focusing on business workflows rather than technical architecture. This ensures your team can confidently manage the connection between marketplace sales and third-party fulfilment.
Maintaining system integrity and error resolution
Support focuses on maintaining the operational integrity of the link between Amazon and Seko. We monitor for stuck orders, inventory status drift, and fulfilment exceptions that could threaten your marketplace standing. By surfacing these failures early, we prevent customer service impact and inventory bloat. Your team has a clear path for resolving operational exceptions, ensuring that discrepancies between Amazon sales data and Seko fulfilment records are addressed on a defined schedule.
Common failures
Inventory latency and overselling
Operational impact: When stock level updates from Seko are not reflected in Amazon Seller Central with sufficient speed, overselling on merchant-fulfilled SKUs becomes a major risk. This leads to cancelled Sales Orders, poor seller metrics, and a reactive customer service workload. The fulfilment team also wastes time investigating stock discrepancies instead of processing live orders.
Prevention / Action: The integration's process design should treat Seko's warehouse management system as the definitive source of truth for merchant-fulfilled inventory. Use a transactional, near real-time queue for all stock adjustments, such as sales or returns, to update Amazon. Maintain separate inventory logic and buffers for FBA stock versus merchant-fulfilled stock to prevent miscalculations.
Misrouted fulfilment requests
Operational impact: Sending Amazon-fulfilled (FBA) orders to Seko by accident creates significant operational noise and commercial risk. Seko's fulfilment team may reject the order, or worse, ship it, resulting in a duplicate shipment and financial loss. This consumes operations and customer service time to resolve and requires complex stock adjustments in both systems.
Prevention / Action: The integration logic must explicitly filter orders based on Amazon's fulfilment channel flag, which designates an order as Amazon-fulfilled or merchant-fulfilled. Only merchant-fulfilled orders should be transmitted to Seko. Implement exception handling to flag and hold any order where the fulfilment channel is ambiguous, preventing it from reaching the warehouse until manually reviewed.
Delayed dispatch confirmations
Operational impact: If shipment confirmations from Seko, including tracking numbers and carrier data, are not sent back to Amazon promptly, it can breach Amazon's strict seller requirements. This directly degrades seller performance metrics, risks temporary account suspension, and delays Amazon's release of funds from sales. The customer service team also faces an increased volume of enquiries from customers who have not received their tracking information.
Prevention / Action: Structure the integration to process dispatch files or webhooks from Seko on a frequent, scheduled basis. The mapping logic must correctly translate Seko's carrier codes and tracking data into the format required by Amazon's APIs. Implement monitoring to detect and alert on any delays in receiving or processing these confirmations, allowing operations teams to act before seller metrics are impacted.
Unreconciled order and fee data
Operational impact: Amazon Settlement Reports are the only source of truth for sales revenue, refunds, and complex variable fees like FBA charges or storage costs. Without a consistently mapped Amazon Merchant Order ID to Seko's Client Reference field, the finance team cannot match settlement data to dispatched goods. This makes calculating true profitability per order impossible and turns the month-end close into a painful, manual reconciliation exercise.
Prevention / Action: Enforce a strict, mandatory mapping of the Merchant Order ID to a designated reference field in Seko during the initial order transfer. This ensures a persistent, shared identifier exists across both platforms. Design a separate data flow to pull Amazon Settlement Reports into a central finance system or data warehouse, where they can be joined with Seko's dispatch records for accurate financial reconciliation.
Product master data mismatches
Operational impact: When a new SKU is live on Amazon but not yet present in Seko's item master catalogue, any resulting orders will fail to import into the warehouse system. This creates a silent backlog of unfulfilled orders, which are often only discovered through manual checks or customer complaints. The same failure occurs if Amazon bundle SKUs are sent to Seko without being broken down into their component SKUs for picking.
Prevention / Action: Establish a clear process for item master data ownership, where SKUs are created and configured in Seko before being made available for sale on Amazon. The integration should validate the existence of all SKUs in an order before sending it to Seko. Any order with an unrecognised SKU should be placed into an exception queue for operational review.
Frequently asked questions
How does the integration handle orders fulfilled by Amazon's FBA service versus those we fulfil via Seko?
This is a critical step in the setup. Sending Amazon-fulfilled orders to Seko results in duplicated shipments and incorrect stock deductions. The logic must use flags within the Amazon order data to route only Merchant Fulfilled Network (MFN) orders to Seko, ensuring the warehouse only acts on orders it is responsible for.
How can we ensure orders in Seko can be traced back to the original Amazon order?
The integration must map the Amazon MerchantOrderID to a specific field in Seko, such as ClientReference, on every Sales Order. This mapping is essential for customer service and finance teams to reconcile fulfilment records in the warehouse back to the original transaction in Seller Central.
How do we reconcile Amazon fees and payouts against Seko shipments?
The only reliable source of truth for financial reconciliation is the Amazon Settlement Report. This data must be used for month-end close, as it is where Amazon consolidates FBA fees, storage charges, and other marketplace costs. Reconciling individual orders in isolation usually leads to reconciliation debt because it ignores these adjustments.
We sell product bundles on Amazon. How does the integration ensure Seko can fulfil these?
Seko's warehouse systems require component SKUs, not abstract bundle SKUs. The integration must break the parent SKU into its constituent component SKUs before the fulfilment request is sent to Seko. If an order is sent to the warehouse containing a bundle SKU that has not been unbundled, it will be rejected, causing fulfilment delays.