The Stone Edge Order Manager (SEOM) is a powerful automation tool for online retailers. It can take processing of orders from a very manual and tedious process, to a fully automated process, or somewhere in between.
Why can order imports be slow?
Many users like to automate routine tasks during the order import. This might include running a MaxMind fraud check, validating address during import, charging credit cards, or using approval rules to revise or manipulate orders. Unfortunately, the more things that you have the software doing during the import, the longer the import will take. This is especially true when that “thing” involves a post to the Internet, such as fraud checks, address validation on both billing and shipping addresses, and credit card processing. If each API call takes one second to post, wait for a response, then process the response, you can see how doing a fraud check, address validation, and credit card pre-authorization can add several seconds to the import of each orders! Multiply that times hundreds or thousands of orders and you’re in for a long wait.
The other bottleneck when import orders has to do with the limitations of reliably importing data between two distinct pieces of software. When SEOM communicates with your sales channels, the software will tell your sales channel the last order number that it imported, and the last date that it imported orders. Most sales channels these days use alphanumeric order numbers. If you sort numbers in an alphanumeric field you would get “1, 10, 2, 3” vs “1, 2, 3, 10” if the field were numeric. Alphanumeric order numbers cannot be sorted sequentially making it unreliable to import new orders based on the next order number in a list. Therefore, most of the integrations have to import by date. If it knows that the last date of an order was 5/18, then it would grab orders from 5/18 forward until it retrieved an order from 5/19. If you import orders multiple times throughout the day (most people do), then every time your import orders for 5/19, it would download ALL orders from that day every time, leaving it up to SEOM to determine which orders had already been successfully imported and ignore those. Obviously, there is a lot of unnecessary processing time handling orders that have already been imported.
The Solution:
We speed up orders by moving to the Connect2Cart service. Connect2Cart is a cloud-based integration service that handles integrations between Stone Edge major shopping cart systems and marketplaces. The Connect2Cart integration communicates when orders have been successfully imported which flags those orders as such eliminating the need to download unnecessary orders repeatedly throughout the day.
The second thing you would want to do is enable automatic address validation on the integration server. Instead of waiting for SEOM to validate both addresses on each import during the order import, you can elect to have the address validated BEFORE they are imported into SEOM.
Contact the Stone Edge Sales team for more information on either solution.