In any business, there are tips, tricks, and tools designed to make your life easier, and in the e-commerce space, these are especially important. Choosing the right software for your business can help you run more efficiently and save you countless hours of stress. This week, we’ve rounded up Seller Accountant’s favorite options for e-commerce sellers.
Accounting Software
As accountants, we (unsurprisingly) put the most emphasis on which accounting software you use to keep track of your business’s finances.
Our top pick for e-commerce sellers is Quickbooks Online (not Quickbooks Desktop or Quickbooks Self-Employed). The interface is easy to use, it is already a familiar piece of software for many accountants, and it allows for granting accountant access to Quickbooks information. Quickbooks Online operates on a subscription model and allows for some complex customization in its analysis reports.
Xero is another widely-used software that’s seen success with many startups, especially those not based in the US. The interface is very simple compared to Quickbooks, but users give Xero a consistently high satisfaction rating, and it performs very well for smaller businesses with less than 2000 transactions a month.
Whichever you choose, plan to stick with it for the long haul and find an accountant who is an expert in your chosen platform. Seller Accountant works exclusively with Quickbooks Online, while our friends over at Museminded are Xero professionals.
Seller Central
If you sell anything on Amazon, Seller Central is unavoidable. Understanding Seller Central as your sales dashboard is make or break for your business, and it comes with a learning curve.
As an Amazon seller, you’ll use Seller Central to keep track of FBA inventory, respond to customer comments and reviews, track ad spending and performance, analyze sales trends, and more. Seller Central is also the place to monitor Amazon seller fees and make decisions about which selling plan you’ll pay to use.
Seller Central isn’t the most user friendly site out there, but as an Amazon seller, it’s important to understand the features it offers. As a beginning seller, pay special attention to Inventory and Business Reports, the Advertising Console, and your Message inbox.
Marketplace Optimization
The final piece of software that every seller should have is some sort of marketplace optimization software. These services provide a variety of tools to help you monitor your business, including KPI metrics, keyword tracking, and Amazon sales reconciliation.
As an accounting firm, Seller Accountant recommends A2X as a top-of-class software service for e-commerce sellers – and we’ve waxed poetic about them in the past. We advise all of our clients to get set up with A2X as soon as possible because it easily bridges the gap between Amazon sales and Quickbooks data. A2X also provides a live support staff to work out any performance issues that may arise.
Aside from A2X, the next two most common software services our clients use are Helium 10 and ManageByStats, which are both sales dashboard tools. Each one allows sellers to better understand their product performance and track sales and advertising data outside of Amazon’s own Seller Central interface. Both also excel as keyword trackers, which makes a big impact in maximizing ROI for ads and discovering product competitors.
Work With Us
If you’re a beginning seller, the software options available to you may seem overwhelming. Concentrating on these three major categories will insure that you’re covered for the basics and will keep you from spending on overhead with other supplemental services. For more information on the best beginner software options