If you are a Seller or Vendor, data is crucial. Being a data-driven merchant means automating your data workflows. Manual data processing is messy, confusing, and time-consuming. There are many tools on the market that allow you to connect to Amazon. We discovered that it is important to ask how these tools connect to your Seller or Vendor account is an important question to ask.
During a build or buy assessment, there were two platforms were reviewed for the "buy" side of the analysis; Openbridge and Saras Analytics Daton. See our review of Openbridge.
The sign-up process for Daton was quick, only taking a few minutes. The one caveat is the "bot" setup process, which can take a few days. More on that later.
In terms of getting data flowing, the process was overall easy to understand. There were some issues post setup, which are detailed later. Generally, this had to do with the UI allowing what are invalid configurations according to Amazon documentation.
Using a test account, the surface area of any risks related to the use of bots was minimized ( a prod account should never be linked to anyone using bots as it is a violation of Amazon terms ). Even using a test account, the idea that some bot processes were running was uncomfortable. However, using the test account allowed us to get an overall sense of the Saras Analytics Daton platform, while not incurring any undue worry.
As we stated earlier, the config process was generally consistent and easy to understand, but the process was not reliable. The UI allowed us to configure integration to Amazon that Amazon stated was not allowed or invalid. For example, the UI allowed configuring a sync every 60 minutes for data that is only available daily. As a matter of fact, the misconfiguration led to our Amazon account becoming unstable, as the requests from Daton were blocking our ERP from working. Not good. Also, we observed inconsistent and unreliable syncs in other cases as well.
The pricing for their service uses row counts, which can be very difficult to estimate. Attempting to project a budget over 12 months was going to require a cost-plus analysis. What is cost-plus pricing? It requires you to determine the base cost of the product and then add a percentage on top of that price use costs. It is not uncommon for row-based billing schemes to be 2x to 10x your base product cost.
Saras Analytics, not Daton, does offer consulting and analytics dashboard templates. If you want pre-designed reporting templates, this may be of interest. The idea of dashboard templates may be appealing to teams looking to have something pre-designed. Openbridge does not offer data visualization or reporting templates. They focus on data engineering, referring anyone that needs Tableau, Data Studio, or Power BI dashboard and reporting to their partner network.
Both Saras Analytics Daton and Openbridge offer solutions for Sellers and Vendors. However, choosing the right one is a function of performance, cost, security, and reliability.
References:
Openbridge vs Saras Analytics Daton
