What Tally ERP 9’s E-Commerce Integration Means for Third-Party Online Sellers?

The retail landscape in India continues to witness drastic changes in the physical world as well as the online world. Firstly, there is a growing realization amongst brick-and-mortar stores to also have an online presence mainly led by the incremental growth experienced by the e-commerce sector. Secondly, the increasing number of online marketplaces (such as eBay, Amazon, Flipkart, and Snapdeal) means any business with reasonable access to the Internet can go online and expand sales channels without increasing its overheads.

To add to this, the growing access to affordable Smartphones and rising subscriptions to mobile Internet connections, the trend of shopping everything from apparel and groceries, to electronics and books online is here to stay. It is important to note that we haven’t yet reached the phase wherein physical point of sale (POS) stores is passé; however, having an online presence multiplies the seller’s exposure to their prospective buyers.

Common challenges faced by small third-party online sellers

From the perspective of a small retailer operating a physical store, the online marketplaces do open up a string of opportunities to increase profitability and expand their market; nevertheless, they bring the following set of challenges:-

1. Managing critical data coming from/going into multiple channels

All retailers who opt to sell online have a demanding task of managing colossal data coming from and going into multiple channels. It becomes difficult to manually manage hosts of excel sheets containing critical data pertaining to product details, orders, sales, inventory status, pricing, and discounts. For instance, imagine having to manually manage all the above data on web marketplaces, including eBay, Amazon, Flipkart, and Snapdeal in addition to the same data from physical POS operations.

2. Syncing and integrating physical POS and online business data

Bi-directional consolidation of inventory and order data across all the sales channels is extremely important aspect yet very difficult to manage manually. To achieve this, it requires syncing and integrating supply-side and order-side data across all physical and virtual stores.

3. Getting real-time visibility of your transactions

Another challenge for small retailers venturing into the e-commerce scene is to get a real-time update of everything happening across all the stages of the supply chain from the time the order is placed online by the customer to coordinating with the warehouse for timely delivery and fulfillment.

A glance at Tally ERP 9’s integration capabilities

Tally ERP 9 is not only versatile business accounting, finance, and inventory management application; it has robust integration capabilities that provide businesses a customized Tally solution that suits their need. This application communicates with the external world mainly using two interfaces: Tally ODBC interface and Tally XML interface.

Tally ODBC (Open Database Connectivity) interface makes it possible to access data from any application, regardless of which database management system (DBMS) is handling the data. This makes possible two-way data transfer between external database applications and Tally ERP database.

Using Tally XML interface, Tally ERP 9 can communicate with any environment capable of sending and receiving XML over HTTP. This means Tally can act as an HTTP Server capable of receiving an XML Request and responding with an XML Response. The entire Tally data can be made available to the requesting application. On the other hand, using the same interface Tally can interact with a web service delivering data over HTTP. In this scenario, Tally behaves as a client retrieving and storing data into an external database. The web service capable of handling Tally Request/Response serves as a layer between Tally and external database.

These integration capabilities make possible Tally-to-Tally; Tally-to-external applications; and Tally-to-web services data synchronization possible.

What this means for online retailers?

For online retailers, this means their web-based e-commerce management applications can be integrated with Tally ERP 9 and Tally Shoper 9 which are used to manage their POS store inventory data. Many experienced Tally Integrators (TI) provide Tally services in which they leverage the power of Tally ODBC or Tally XML interface as a bridge to synchronize data between their web marketplace stores (such as eBay, Amazon, and Flipkart) and Tally ERP 9.

By integrating Tally with online web store management applications, the retailers can constantly track their inventory data and purchase orders without having to go back to the dated spread sheets (for each sales channel) and manually update them. To cite an example, all the product, pricing, and inventory data on Tally ERP 9 can be synced with the online store application whilst the customer orders and invoices received on the online stores can be synced with Tally ERP 9. This bi-directional data associativity gives real-time business intelligence to retailers and provides them predictability to scale their operations sustainably.

Riyaz Tamboli is a Director at Antraweb Technologies Pvt. Ltd., a leading provider of Tally ERP solutions built on the Tally platform.