Amazon Vendor Central and Seko
Integration Agency & Consultants
Fulfilment becomes a liability when Amazon Vendor Central orders accumulate faster than your team can manually process them into Seko. At scale, the manual entry of Purchase Orders and the delayed transmission of Advance Ship Notices lead to inevitable chargebacks and compliance failures. We connect these systems to automate the order-to-shipment cycle, ensuring vendor compliance is maintained through accurate data mapping. This removes the operational drag of manual reconciliation and protects your vendor standing by meeting Amazon's strict delivery windows.
Technical audits for your marketplace ecosystem
We connect your Amazon Vendor Central and Seko integrations quickly, supporting Marketplaces and WMS/3PL connections. Our consulting services are valuable because our system audit identifies inefficiencies and integration gaps across Amazon Vendor Central, Seko, Marketplaces, and WMS/3PL. This enables our consultants and your team to take decisive action, ensuring your technology ecosystem runs efficiently. With our expertise, you can deliver a great experience to your customers and keep your operations running smoothly as your business grows.
Solution Design
The design for Amazon Vendor Central and Seko centres on automating the path between purchase order acceptance and the Advance Ship Notice (ASN). We designate Amazon as the source of truth for order demand, with inventory levels pushed from Seko on a defined schedule. One design trade-off is the decision to use batched inventory updates. While real-time syncing sounds ideal, batching provides greater stability and prevents system strain during high-volume events. We prioritise the immediate transmission of shipment confirmations so that Amazon delivery windows are met. This allows the warehouse to stay out of the Amazon portal, while finance relies on shipping data that is accurately mapped to the original purchase orders.
Automating purchase orders and inventory syncs
This integration treats Amazon Vendor Central as the source of demand, with Purchase Orders flowing to Seko for fulfilment. We prioritise the return flow of shipment notifications from Seko to Amazon to meet strict delivery windows and avoid late-delivery penalties. Inventory levels synchronise on a defined schedule to maintain accuracy and prevent overselling on the marketplace. By monitoring the transition between the order and the shipment confirmation, the integration identifies data gaps, such as mapping errors or incorrect carrier information, before they result in Amazon compliance failures. This ensures that shipment data matches the physical delivery requirements, protecting the vendor scorecard.
Secure orchestration on enterprise middleware platforms
Leveraging IPaaS with ISO 27001 and SOC 2 and above security accreditations enables secure, efficient integration between Amazon Vendor Central, Seko, Marketplaces, and WMS/3PL systems. This approach simplifies connecting Amazon Vendor Central and Seko with Marketplaces and WMS/3PL, ensuring data protection and compliance. IPaaS platforms reduce manual effort, support scalability, and provide centralised management, making integrations more reliable and secure for all parties involved.
Surfacing exceptions to prevent vendor chargebacks
Amazon compliance is binary. Standard dashboards often miss the quiet failures, such as data mapping errors or SKU mismatches, that lead to chargebacks. We provide visibility into the lifecycle of every order, from the initial Purchase Order to the final shipment notification. This allows operations teams to identify exactly where a record is stuck before the shipping window closes. By surfacing these exceptions early, teams can resolve data gaps before they become Amazon compliance failures.
Operational manuals for finance and logistics
Handover focuses on the operations and finance teams who own the daily flow of purchase orders and shipment data. We establish a clear operating model so your team understands how to read shipment alerts and where product data is mastered. Operations learn to monitor pending shipment notices daily, while finance is shown how to reconcile Seko despatch records against Amazon purchase orders to prevent reconciliation debt. Documentation is provided as a practical operational manual, detailing who owns each exception when sync issues occur. This ensures your team can manage the integration and maintain marketplace compliance.
Governance for evolving Amazon compliance rules
Post-launch, we provide ongoing monitoring to ensure systems remain aligned as Amazon Vendor Central requirements or your product catalogue evolves. Our support model focuses on resolving operational exceptions, such as ASN sync failures or mapping mismatches, before they escalate into fulfilment delays or chargebacks. This ensures the integration layer remains a reliable tool for managing high volume without increasing the burden of manual work on your operations team.
Common failures
Delayed Advance Ship Notice (ASN) transmission
Operational impact: Amazon requires the ASN to be transmitted before a shipment arrives at their fulfilment centre. Late or missing ASNs result in financial penalties and can cause rejected shipments. This creates immediate logistical pressure and damages your vendor compliance score.
Prevention / Action: The integration must trigger ASN generation immediately upon Seko's shipment confirmation. We move away from periodic schedules to event-based updates where possible, ensuring the data reaches Amazon within the required window.
Mismatched units of measure
Operational impact: If Amazon orders in cases but Seko picks in 'eaches', inventory discrepancies and under-shipments occur. This leads to immediate chargebacks and forces finance into complex manual reconciliations for incorrect invoice values.
Prevention / Action: The integration translates Amazon Purchase Order quantities using a clear unit of measure mapping. Product data remains the source of truth for these conversions, with regular audits to prevent configuration drift between the marketplace and the warehouse.
Incorrect carrier and service mapping
Operational impact: Amazon rejects ASNs if the carrier and service codes do not match their registry. These rejections trigger compliance fees and force the team to manually correct and resubmit data under tight time pressure.
Prevention / Action: We maintain a central mapping table that translates Seko's shipment codes into Amazon's required carrier strings. This ensures data integrity at the point of transmission and flags unmapped codes for immediate intervention.
Lost order references for reconciliation
Operational impact: Without the original Amazon PO number flowing through to the Seko despatch record, finance cannot reconcile payments against despatches. This results in reconciliation debt and a reliance on manual line-by-line checks at month-end.
Prevention / Action: The Amazon Purchase Order Number is enforced as the primary external reference. This key stays attached to the record as it moves to Seko, ensuring every shipment confirmation can be linked back to the source order for automated financial matching.
Frequently asked questions
How does the integration ensure Advance Ship Notices (ASNs) are sent to Amazon correctly and on time?
The integration maps data from Seko's shipment confirmation back to the precise EDI 856 ASN format Amazon Vendor Central requires. This automated process ensures details like carrier codes and package information are correct, avoiding ASN rejections from Amazon that can lead to compliance chargebacks and delay payment.
What happens when Amazon Vendor Central sends a Purchase Order, and how is it acknowledged?
When an EDI 850 Purchase Order is received from Amazon Vendor Central, the integration automatically creates the corresponding sales order in Seko's system for fulfilment. It then generates and transmits an EDI 855 Purchase Order Acknowledgement back to Amazon, preventing orders from being missed and ensuring compliance with Amazon's required communication protocols.
How do we trace an order from Amazon through to its despatch status in Seko?
The integration maps Amazon's 'MerchantOrderID' from the incoming Purchase Order directly to a reference field on the order record within Seko. This creates a clear audit trail for every order, allowing operations or finance teams to find an order's fulfilment status in Seko using the original Amazon ID without cross-referencing spreadsheets.
Our main concern is avoiding Amazon's chargebacks. How does the integration address this?
Most penalties arise from inaccurate data submitted to Amazon Vendor Central, particularly for Advance Ship Notices (ASNs). The integration automates ASN creation using actual shipment data from Seko, which prevents common errors in communicating carrier codes and tracking information. This directly addresses the root cause of many compliance chargebacks related to the order fulfilment process.