Cron jobs are an inevitable part of multichannel selling. Without a cron job, it would be really distressing to sell on different channels. Because in Magento cron job ensures that everything such as new order notification, product price, stock, etc. is updated to the latest data across all the seller accounts.
Multichannel is both rewarding and challenging all together. It reaps many benefits by which sellers can take their businesses to another extent. Thus, in this article, we will know about the cron jobs, how they are beneficial for Multichannel selling and much more.
Multichannel Selling:
In the Multichannel selling method, the sellers are not limited to sell on a single channel. Instead, they can enlist their products or services on any number of marketplaces. Thus, they can reach the global e-commerce market with the huge availability of potential customers across the whole world. It is not just beneficial on the financial side but it is also great for developing your brand and its popularity.
Importance of Multichannel Selling for Sellers:
With rapid innovations and advancements in the e-commerce industry, online selling has become a cakewalk even for the novice in this field. Due to this, the e-commerce market has become quite competitive. The best way to stay ahead of your competitors is to reach maximum customers and sell on multiple marketplaces. There are numerous ways by which multichannel selling helps sellers:
- Sellers can reach audiences of different parts of the world by selling on multiple marketplaces. Thus, it ultimately increases the customer base.
- There is a diverse range of customers on different marketplaces with varied preferences. If you target them properly, you can turn them into regular patrons and increase the conversion rate.
- In Multichannel selling, the investment is higher in comparison to Omnichannel selling but you will also get higher ROI on selling on multiple platforms.
- Multichannel selling will not just increase the sales but is also a way to increase the presence of your brand in different regions or platforms. It increases brand visibility and leaves a long-lasting impression.
As per a report, more than 75% of online sellers prefer to sell on multiple platforms because of the varied advantages of multichannel selling.
But still, there are some merchants who don’t dare to explore multichannel selling as they have a prejudice that managing multiple channels would be arduous especially if you have a huge inventory, updating, and enlisting products will consume a lot of time & effort if done manually. It is somewhat true but not when you are using Magento for your e-commerce store. Magento gives you automated solutions by which you can sell and manage your seller panels on different marketplaces. This automatic job is popularly known as Cron job or Cron Scheduler. This simple solution will make the selling process quite easy and efficient.
What is Cron Job?
A Cron job gets an update or repeats a task after a predefined interval of time. This scheduler is not visible as it runs in the background and makes manual tasks automatic & straightforward which else will take hours to complete manually.
List of Some Cron Jobs with their Use:
- Order Cron – It can fetch order on the basis of three configurations (just like the Fetch Orders button of the manage Orders grid)
- Sync and Cancel Order Cron – It can cancel orders from the marketplace seller panel and create a credit memo of those orders
- Inventory Pricing Cron – This cron job can synchronize inventory and price for those products whose price or stock gets changed just like the Sync Inv Price mass action of managing the product grid.
- Status Synchronization Cron – Sync the status from the marketplace seller panel to Magento
- Shipment Cron – Sync the tracking or shipment details to the marketplace seller for the order which are marked completed in Sales Order but exists as Acknowledge status in the marketplace order
- Clean Feeds Cron – This cron job will delete the Product feed which is created for every product related action
- Product Update Cron – Sync products details of those products whose any attribute got changed or recently updated in Magento
- Status Difference Log Cron – Log the products whose status attribute value of Magento doesn’t match with marketplace product status.
- End Relist Item Cron – End or relist those products which are logged in the product change log table or grid as relist or enlist
Real-life Example:
Let’s go through a real-life example to better understand. Consider there is an online retailer with his own e-commerce website and also sells on popular e-commerce marketplaces Amazon and eBay. Suppose the seller is having 10 products in stock and a customer made an order of two of those products on Amazon. Now how the seller will deal with it in a normal scenario i.e. without a cron job:
Firstly, the merchant will visit the online store and then on Amazon & eBay to check if there is any new order. On visiting Amazon, he finds that there is an order of two products. But since the stock information on eBay and his online store is also ten, he had to open the sellers’ accounts on both channels and update the stock manually (from 10 to 8). After updating the stock information, he can proceed with the order received on Amazon.
Another scenario:
The seller wants to update the pricing of one of the products. The seller has to visit every channel to update the price on each channel. The whole process should be carried out manually.
What if the seller wants to add a new product?
The seller will add a product to his e-commerce store, add all the attributes, pricing, stock etc. Then, again he has to visit the different multi-channels and add the product manually on those channels.
Sounds quite complicated?
Doing manually the above-mentioned tasks will require a lot of effort, time and can result in errors due to confusion. And if there is an error, you have to also find it manually.
How is Magento 2 Cron Job helpful in overcoming these problems?
Now you must have understood the importance of selling on different e-commerce marketplaces along with your Magento store, cron jobs will make your selling process easier and more efficient. In easy words, you don’t have to face issues of overselling or missing an important notification. Some of the major benefits of the Magento 2 cron job are:
Automated Selling:
The main motive of a cron job in Magento is to make manual tasks (which took a lot of time to implement) automatic. It saves the seller time and precious effort in doing other crucial tasks which require more focus.
Inventory Synchronization:
The sellers don’t need to update the stock or inventory on each channel manually. Instead, they can just make the inventory changes on their primary channel i.e. their Magento store and the same will be reflected on other channels.
Price Synchronization:
There are some products whose prices change frequently and it is really challenging to manage them on multiple marketplaces. But using the Magento cron job, sellers can easily manage it.
Order Synchronization (Order Import)
If the orders are not in automation on your Magento store, then you will not get notifications for the new orders on other channels. The cron job automatically acknowledges the new orders when it arrives on the marketplace and imports it back on your Magento store.
Shipment Synchronization:
You can track all the shipment-related activities using the Magento 2 cron job scheduler and update the same on other marketplaces as well. It is an automatic process and starts when the shipment is created.
Creating new product:
In the above example, the seller has to create the orders manually on each marketplace but the Magento 2 cron job scheduler, will automatically sync the new addition across all the marketplaces. Thus, the sellers don’t need to do these things manually.
Cron job is a very simple yet effective solution not for only those merchants who are selling on multiple marketplaces but also for those who are operating a single Magento store.
How we are helpful?
We can implement multiple cron jobs in your Magento multichannel marketplace that connects merchants’ Magento store and marketplace seller accounts with a centralized platform. You will be able to access all your accounts and manage everything from this panel.
Wrapping Up:
At Ceymox Technologies, the best Magento development company in India, we are having expertise in implementing such custom features & functionalities, developing new Magento stores from scratch, upgrading the Magento version to the latest one, developing custom Magento extensions and much more. Let us know your requirements.
