Process Automation - Noverstock

The Chaos of Commerce: Why Manual Supplier Integration is Killing Your Margin

If you’re a big-scale seller on Amazon and Shopify, you know the truth: the moment your SKU count tops a few hundred, your commerce operation becomes a game of perpetual cleanup. You’re constantly firefighting instead of scaling. The enemy? Manual supplier integration.

The Status Quo—relying on spreadsheets, outdated ERPs, or point-to-point connections—forces you to pay a hidden cost we call the Status Quo Tax.

This tax manifests in several costly ways:

Out-of-Stocks on Amazon: You run a promotion, and the supplier’s stock file is two hours old. The result? Overselling, cancelled orders, and an immediate hit to your seller reputation.
Slow SKU Scaling: Every time you want to onboard a new supplier, it takes weeks of custom coding or mapping. The manual chaos makes scaling $500+ SKUs feel impossible.
Latency and Errors: Discrepancies between what your supplier has and what your channels show due to delayed data updates. This is where your profit margin leaks.

Introducing the Agent Management System (AMS) for E-commerce Supplier Automation

The manual approach to supplier management is fundamentally broken. It was designed for a 1-to-1 world, not the N-to-N multichannel reality of modern e-commerce. The Agent Management System (AMS) is the critical shift.

AMS is the new operating system for commerce. It’s a unified layer that sits above your existing tools (ERPs, WMS) and connects them directly to your sales channels. But the real difference is the use of intelligent, dedicated software Agents.

Legacy stacks require heavy, custom, and fragile API connections. AMS provides a path for true Automated Supplier Integration by deploying specialized agents to handle the complexity, instantly connecting you to any partner without manual chaos.

The Agent-Powered Method for Seamless Automated Supplier Integration

How does AMS eliminate the integration nightmare? It replaces human effort with highly specialized agents that never sleep, never make a typo, and handle every format a supplier throws at you.

Agent 1: The Connector Agent (Instant Multi-Format Ingestion)

The Connector Agent is your digital translator. It understands that suppliers operate on a mix of technology levels.

This agent bypasses the traditional roadblock of needing a perfect API. It instantly connects to any supplier source:

FTP/SFTP Feeds
Legacy EDI
Modern REST APIs
Even unstructured documents and spreadsheets

This means weeks of traditional integration work are reduced to minutes. This is the definition of powerful E-commerce Supplier Automation.

Agent 2: The Normalization Agent (Data Quality Control)

Connecting is only half the battle. Every supplier uses different terminology, different field names, and different measurement units.

The Normalization Agent takes all that messy, disparate supplier data and instantly harmonizes it into a single, unified data model. It cleans and vets:

SKU and UPC matching
Product specification harmonization
Pricing structure and currency conversion

You get clean, reliable data before it ever touches your storefronts, eliminating costly errors.

Agent 3: The Stock Sync Agent (Real-Time Multichannel Stock Sync)

This is the key to maximizing revenue and seller scores. The Stock Sync Agent ensures your inventory levels are always accurate across all your selling platforms—Amazon, Shopify, and any others.

It guarantees a near-instant, real-time sync of stock levels to multiple channels simultaneously, leveraging accurate data from the Normalization Agent. This finally eliminates the number one cause of cancellations and poor customer experience: overselling due to delayed updates.

Beyond Integration: The Profitability Impact of Agent Management Systems (AMS)

The benefits of AMS extend far beyond simply linking two systems. By solving the supplier integration problem, AMS unlocks unprecedented scaling potential for big-scale sellers:

Massive Scale Acceleration: Easily and confidently add dozens of new SKUs and suppliers without worrying about breaking your back-end. You can confidently scale beyond 500+ SKUs with ease.
Margin Protection: Accurate, real-time inventory data prevents overselling and reduces the need for costly emergency re-orders. Your inventory is now reliable enough to feed into sophisticated profitability analytics.
Future-Proofing: AMS is built for the future of commerce, where AI-powered operations are standard. You are installing a system designed for inevitable growth.

Ready to End the Status Quo Tax on Your E-commerce Business?

If you are tired of paying the Status Quo Tax through constant manual cleanup, inventory errors, and missed opportunities, it’s time to stop letting supplier data dictate your potential. The era of manual commerce is over.

The language of commerce is evolving. If your business is ready to move beyond the limitations of legacy systems, you know that terms like “ERP implementation” and “point solution integration” sound more like problems than solutions.

To move into an automation-first future, you need a new vocabulary. This AMS Glossary defines the essential terms for understanding and deploying an Agent Management System—the next evolution of your commerce operating stack.

Core Agent Management System (AMS) Terminology

These are the foundational terms for the new, unified, and automated world of commerce.

Agent Management System (AMS)

The AMS is a new category of software that serves as the central “operating brain” for modern commerce businesses. Unlike traditional ERPs that merely record data, an AMS uses autonomous, workflow-driven agents to actively automate manual processes across the entire commerce backbone: supplier sync, listings, pricing, and shipping. It is designed for scale without adding headcount.

The Agent Ecosystem

These terms define the components that make the AMS function:

Agent: The fundamental unit of automation within the AMS. A self-governing bot designed to execute a specific, repetitive, or complex operational task (e.g., updating inventory across channels).
Agent Recipe: A pre-built, reusable workflow that solves a common commerce problem. Recipes can be deployed instantly to automate complex tasks without custom coding.
Commerce OS: The unified, single-control hub provided by the AMS. It eliminates the need to stitch together multiple point solutions, ensuring all operational data and automation workflows live in one central, orchestrated environment.
Commerce Operating Brain: A synonym for the Agent Management System, emphasizing its function as the intelligent, decision-making center that coordinates all operational data and tasks.

The Automation-First Philosophy

This lexicon defines the operational shift the AMS enables:

Automation-First Stack: A technology architecture where every core operational process (inventory, orders, supplier comms) is designed for and executed by automation, with the human operator intervening only for exceptions.
Automation-First Commerce: The business philosophy that prioritizes autonomous, machine-driven workflows over manual human intervention for all high-volume, repetitive operational tasks.
Headless Commerce Automation: The separation of the front-end customer experience from the back-end AMS, allowing agents to automate operations independently of the customer-facing website or channel.

Key Functions and Solutions Enabled by AMS

These terms describe the specific operational areas where an AMS delivers automation and control.

Automation Area	Term	Definition
Supply Chain	Supplier Automation	The use of agents to automatically connect with, ingest data from, and send orders to supplier systems, eliminating manual communication and data entry errors.
Inventory	Inventory Automation System	The AMS function that automatically tracks, updates, and synchronizes inventory levels across all sales channels in real-time to prevent overselling and stockouts.
Orders	Order Automation Software	The automated handling of the order lifecycle, from ingestion and routing to fulfillment and tracking, without manual operator intervention.
Pricing	Pricing Automation	The function that uses agents to automatically set, adjust, and optimize product prices based on pre-defined rules, competitor data, and margin goals.
Pricing	Dynamic Pricing	The advanced strategy where prices are continuously optimized in real-time, often multiple times per day, based on market demand, inventory levels, and specific profitability targets.
Data Sync	Multichannel Orchestration	The act of seamlessly coordinating all sales channels from one central AMS hub, ensuring perfect data parity and eliminating fragmentation.

The Language of Pain and Profit

These terms define the challenges that scaling companies face today and the financial wins unlocked by the AMS.

ERP Tax: The hidden, ongoing cost of sticking with rigid, monolithic Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems, including the expense of customization, maintenance, and lost margin due to poor real-time data visibility.
Point Solution Sprawl: The operational chaos and inefficiency that result from an operations team using dozens of disconnected, single-function software tools.
Margin Leakage: The slow, systematic loss of profit caused by manual errors, inventory mistakes, order mismanagement, and slow reaction times to competitor pricing.
SKU Scaling: The logistical and technical challenge of efficiently growing a product catalog past a critical mass (often 500+ SKUs). Manual processes inherently break at this stage.
Profitability Dashboard: A real-time, consolidated view within the AMS that tracks gross and net profit across every single SKU, sales channel, and transaction.
Overselling: A critical problem where an item is sold on one channel despite being out of stock due to delayed inventory synchronization—a problem eliminated by real-time AMS agents.
Manual SKU Updates: The time-consuming, error-prone process of manually updating product details, descriptions, or pricing across multiple spreadsheets and channels, which the AMS replaces entirely.

Ready to Speak the Language of Automation?

Understanding these terms is the first step toward scaling your commerce operations efficiently. The Agent Management System isn’t just another software; it’s a completely new blueprint for how commerce should operate—autonomously, accurately, and profitably.

Want to see an agent in action? Request a personalized demo today.

If you’re an eCommerce Operations Manager or a Supply Chain Executive, you’re likely living in a world of manual chaos. Your operations, from supplier communication to multichannel inventory sync, are held together by a fragile web of spreadsheets, fragmented point solutions, and endless manual data entry. This hidden cost of staying the same isn’t just a nuisance; it’s a direct drain on your profits and a barrier to growth.

Scaling with this approach is simply impossible. As you add more products or channels, the problem doesn’t just grow—it explodes into a mess of errors and wasted time. But what if there was a better way?

What is an Agent Management System? Defining the New Category

An Agent Management System (AMS) is a new class of software designed to put an end to this chaos. While legacy ERPs and point solutions are built for human users, an AMS is a “Commerce OS” built to automate the work. It doesn’t just manage data; it uses intelligent, pre-built or custom “agents” to perform complex, repetitive tasks across your entire operational stack.

Think of it as the central brain of your commerce operations. It unifies and orchestrates everything, creating a seamless, automated workflow from end to end. An AMS is the core technology that makes true eCommerce operations automation possible, finally freeing you from the manual grind.

Key Functions of an AMS: Automating the Supply Chain

This new category of AMS software offers a suite of powerful capabilities that work together to streamline your business:

Automated Supplier Integration: An AMS uses agents to automatically sync with all your suppliers. This means no more manual emails or phone calls to get a new SKU integrated or to find out about inventory levels.
Multichannel Sync Without Errors: The agents work tirelessly behind the scenes to keep your product data, pricing, and inventory in perfect sync across every sales channel. This is the end of overselling and costly order cancellations.
Profitability Analytics: Instead of waiting for weekly reports, an AMS gives you real-time visibility into your profitability. You can see your gross and net profit on every single SKU and sales channel, allowing for smarter, faster business decisions.
Shipping Orchestration: From getting the best shipping rates to generating labels and tracking orders, an AMS automates the entire shipping process, ensuring a smooth and efficient final mile for your customers.

This powerful supply chain agent management reduces human-driven errors and ensures your systems are always talking to each other, so you never have to be the middleman.

The ROI of an AMS: How to Cut Costs & Scale Faster

The real benefit of an Agent Management System is found on your balance sheet and in your team’s productivity. By eliminating the manual chaos and the hidden “Status Quo Tax,” an AMS directly impacts your profitability and allows for unprecedented growth.

You’ll reduce operational costs by cutting down on expensive, outdated software and the human hours spent on menial tasks. More importantly, it frees up your most valuable resource—your team—to focus on strategic initiatives, like sourcing new products, optimizing marketing campaigns, and building customer relationships.

Who Needs an Agent Management System?

If you’re an eCommerce Operations Manager or a Supply Chain Executive, an AMS becomes a necessity the moment your business starts to truly scale. While you might be able to handle a few dozen SKUs with spreadsheets, once you scale to 500 or more, your manual processes will inevitably break. An AMS is the solution for ambitious teams ready to move beyond managing chaos and start building a scalable, automated operation.

The Future of Commerce is Autonomous: The Agent Era

Just as spreadsheets replaced manual ledgers and ERPs unified departments, the AMS is the next inevitable evolution of commerce technology. It’s a new category that automates the last frontier of commerce—the manual, human-driven tasks—and Noverstock is leading the charge in defining it.

Ready to See a True Commerce OS in Action?

You’ve read about the future of commerce operations. Now, it’s time to see it in action. An AMS is the key to unlocking true efficiency and profitability in your business.

Want to see Agent Management Systems in action? Request a personalized demo today.

E-Commerce Challenges: What Sellers Are Looking For

E-commerce business owners, whether new or experienced, are constantly searching for ways to improve their operations. The demands of multichannel selling, inventory accuracy, order management, and profitability tracking make it crucial to have the right tools.

What do sellers search for?

“How do I prevent overselling and stockouts?”
“What’s the best way to optimize pricing for better profit margins?”
“How do I automate order fulfillment without hiring a larger team?”
“Can I track my real profits after platform fees, shipping, and taxes?”

Without the right ERP system, managing multiple platforms can be time-consuming, inefficient, and costly. That’s where Noverstock simplifies the process—helping businesses run smarter, not harder.

1. The Search for Better Inventory Control

The Challenge: Managing inventory across Amazon, eBay, Shopify, and other platforms can be a nightmare when stock levels don’t sync properly. Without real-time updates, sellers face:

Overselling, leading to canceled orders and customer complaints.

Manual stock adjustments, wasting hours of valuable time.

Increased fulfillment delays due to mismanaged stock allocations.

How Noverstock Solves It:

Real-Time Inventory Sync—Automatically updates stock levels across all sales channels.

Multi-Warehouse Stock Tracking—Monitor and adjust inventory across different locations effortlessly.

Low-Stock Alerts—Get notified before running out of high-demand products.

💡 With Noverstock, sellers gain complete control over inventory, preventing stock errors and missed sales.

2. The Need for Smarter Pricing & Profit Optimization

The Challenge: Sellers need a clear pricing strategy to maximize profits while staying competitive. Many struggle to:

Factor in platform fees, shipping costs, and taxes when setting prices.

Adjust pricing quickly across hundreds of SKUs.

Maintain a balance between competitive pricing and healthy margins.

How Noverstock’s NS Calculator Helps:

Real-Time Profit Calculations—Automatically considers all platform fees and operational costs.

Smart Pricing Recommendations—Suggests the best pricing strategy for higher conversions.

Bulk Price Adjustments—Update pricing across multiple platforms instantly.

💡 With NS Calculator, sellers confidently set profitable, competitive prices—without guesswork.

3. Automating Manual Tasks for Faster, Smoother Operations

The Challenge: Sellers waste too much time on repetitive tasks like:

Approving orders manually for fulfillment.

Adjusting stock levels after every sale.

Manually updating product listings across platforms.

How Noverstock’s Automation Features Help:

Automatic Order Processing—Orders are approved, assigned, and processed instantly.

Stock & Listing Sync—Automatically updates product details across all channels.

Custom Automation Rules—Create triggers for price changes, stock updates, and order approvals.

💡 By automating daily operations, Noverstock allows businesses to scale without extra workload.

4. Understanding True Business Performance

The Challenge: Many sellers operate without knowing how profitable they really are. Without a clear analytics system, they struggle to:

Identify best-performing SKUs.

Track marketplace-specific sales trends.

Optimize stock purchasing and reordering.

How Noverstock’s Analytics Provide Clarity:

Real-Time Sales Tracking—View sales performance across Amazon, eBay, and Shopify in one dashboard.

Profitability Insights—Get a breakdown of revenue vs. true net profit.

Product Performance Reports—Know which SKUs drive the most sales and profits.

💡 With Noverstock, sellers make data-driven decisions to grow smarter and scale efficiently.

Are You a High-Volume Seller?

Need a fully scalable ERP solution? ✅ Noverstock centralizes operations and scales with your growth.
Want to reduce errors and automate complex workflows? ✅ Custom rules handle pricing, stock updates, and order fulfillment.

No matter your business stage, Noverstock is designed to help you succeed.

Book a Demo Today! and experience how Noverstock transforms your e-commerce operations.

In today’s fast-paced commerce landscape, businesses face increasing pressure to process orders quickly, reduce costs, and maintain accuracy. The challenge is even greater for companies handling massive volumes across multiple platforms. That’s where we come in.

Our system is more than just an automation tool—it’s a highly customizable operation-driven back-office solution designed to process large-scale orders while reflecting the complexities of real-world workflows. Let’s dive into the unique principles and innovations that set us apart.

Breaking Away from the Norm: Operation-Driven Automation

Most systems in the industry rely on event-driven workflows, where actions are triggered in response to specific events, often leading to rigidity and inefficiency. We took a different approach: operation-driven automation.

What Does Operation-Driven Mean?

Instead of reacting to events, our system operates based on defined roles and responsibilities that mimic how real humans manage order workflows. For example:

A Warehouse Picker focuses exclusively choosing which warehouse will fulfill an order
The Shipping Service Selector determines the optimal courier and service, factoring in costs, risks, destinations, weights, etc…

This separation of roles ensures each decision tree is highly specialized, scalable, and adaptable to unique business needs.

Decision Trees: The Backbone of Our System

At the heart of our system are decision trees—custom logic frameworks designed to automate decisions for specific operational goals.

How They Work

Each tree is tied to a defined goal and can emit specific actions. These trees are:

Rule-Based Yet Dynamic: While built on clear rules, they adapt to the internal state of orders.
Focused on Precision: Trees reflect business roles, preventing overlaps or conflicts in decision-making.
Future-Ready: We’re building an AI-powered tool to help users create and manage these trees, democratizing access to advanced automation.

Proprietary Language for Decision Trees

We developed our own decision tree language to:

Enable easy declaration of rules and logic.
Test and validate decision tree behavior in real time, ensuring they work as intended.
Optimize performance with a custom-built compiler that processes decisions quickly, even under heavy workloads.

The Lifecycle of an Order

Our system ensures every order is processed with precision from the moment it enters the pipeline. Here’s how:

Fetching and Mapping:
- Orders are pulled from external platforms by the Fetcher.
- The Data Mapper standardizes and cleans data, ensuring it’s ready for processing.
Validation:
- Orders undergo thorough checks for state, source authenticity, and data integrity.
- This step eliminates errors before orders progress further.
Pre-Creation Decision Trees:
- Order Processing Ranker: Prioritizes handling based on criteria like urgency or customer type.
- Order Status Changer: Updates the order’s status based on business rules.
- Default Value Resolver: Fills in missing data fields for seamless downstream processing.
Order Creation:
- Once validated, the order is created in the system and stored securely.
Post-Creation Decision Trees:
- Assign Flags and Tags: Identifies fraud risks or applies custom tags to control order flow.
Automatic Actions Queue:
- Orders enter a loop of decision trees for further optimization, handling tasks like shipping service selection, warehouse operations, and profit calculations.
User Queue:
- Fully processed orders are ready for user-facing tasks like fulfillment or reporting.

Deep Dive into the Automatic Actions Queue

At the heart of our system’s operational brilliance lies the Automatic Actions Queue. This queue is where the system truly shines, running a series of highly specialized decision trees to optimize every aspect of an order.

How It Works

When an order enters the Automatic Actions Queue, it undergoes a sequence of decision trees, each designed to address a specific part of the order lifecycle. What sets this apart is its iterative nature: if any tree makes changes to the order, the queue reevaluates the updated order to ensure all conditions are met.

Key Decision Trees in the Queue

Warehouse Picker
- Determines which warehouse should handle the order, optimizing for proximity, stock levels, and operational efficiency.
- Ensures minimal transit times for items, improving overall delivery speed.
Product Matcher
- Matches items in the order to products in the internal nomenclature.
- This ensures consistency, even when data from external platforms is incomplete or inconsistent.
Assign Package
- Evaluates the dimensions, weight, and nature of the items in the order to suggest the most cost-effective and suitable packaging.
Assign Order Attributes
- Determines critical metadata for the order, such as:
  - HS Codes: Harmonized System codes for customs declarations.
  - ADR Flags: Identifies whether the order contains hazardous materials requiring special handling.
  - Content Descriptions: For detailed shipping documentation.
Shipping Service Selection
- - Destination country and associated risks.
    - Price and weight constraints.
    - Service options like insurance, delivery times, and courier reliability.
    - Handles complex rules, such as prioritizing cost savings for low-margin goods or ensuring insured shipping for high-value items.
Assign Forecasted Shipping Cost
- Calculates an estimated shipping cost based on the selected service and package details.
- Provides valuable insights for profit calculations later in the process.
Warehouse Quantity Reservation
- Decides whether to reserve stock for the order, ensuring high-demand items are appropriately allocated.
Change Order Status
- Updates the order’s status if specific criteria are met, such as completing fulfillment steps or detecting anomalies during processing.
Reduce Order Quantities
- Evaluates whether the quantities in the order should be adjusted, often due to stock shortages or customer preferences.
Project and Seller Resolver
- Links the order to the correct internal project or seller, especially useful for businesses operating with multiple sales channels or regions.
Profit Calculator
- Uses heuristic formulas to determine the most accurate profit margin for the order.
- Factors in costs such as product price, shipping, warehouse handling, and operational expenses.
ProcessREDUCE_ITEM_UNITS
- Addresses scenarios where items in the order need quantity adjustments, ensuring that operational priorities are respected.

Scalability and Reliability: Built for Growth

Our system isn’t just intelligent—it’s built to handle growth and high demands. Here’s how we ensure reliability:

Horizontally Scalable Executors: Decision tree executors can scale horizontally to process thousands of orders per second.
Message Queues: Efficiently manage communication between components, ensuring smooth workflows.
Proprietary Compiler: Optimizes decision trees for speed and reliability, even under heavy workloads.

Transparency for Users and Engineers

We believe in making operations clear and actionable for everyone involved.

Engineering Monitoring: Provides real-time insights into performance and system health, allowing engineers to act quickly when needed.
User-Facing Progress Trackers: Track each order’s progress through the system, giving users visibility into key steps like validation, shipping, and tagging.

Looking Ahead: The Future of Automation

We’re not stopping here. Our vision includes:

AI-Powered Tree Management: Making it easy for non-technical users to create, manage, and optimize decision trees with minimal effort.
Modern Frontend Interfaces: Bringing cutting-edge design to deliver a seamless user experience.

By constantly innovating, we’re committed to empowering businesses with tools that scale with their ambitions.

This article was produced with the assistance of an AI language assistant to enhance its clarity, style, and structure. All technical content, ideas, and insights were provided by our team, ensuring the article reflects our expertise and vision.

The Challenge: How to assign different shipping carriers and services to 2k+ orders daily while lowering costs.

The Outcome: With the help of our advanced automation engine for assigning shipping services and carriers, the client managed to organize its logistics and supply chain, without the need for employees to remember every possible scenario. This resulted in a 0% chance for human error, while also lowering related costs by 20% and decreasing average handling time by 30%.

Details: Our client is selling its brands of textile products on Amazon (Fulfilled by a merchant), eBay, and Shopify worldwide, with the help of warehouses and shipping carriers in 11 countries.

He came to us with a problem – how to easily assign shipping carriers and shipping services to 1000+ orders a day without having the need to remember each rule for assigning carriers or the need to teach someone on their team to do that and remember every possible scenario.

The goal was to automate the selection process so that the chance for human error could be reduced to 0, while also decreasing cost and handling time while maintaining high-quality service.

We had a detailed discussion about the problem of our client and decided to implement a set of smart automated actions that helped alleviate the workload from the employees and made sure that the cheapest, yet fastest possible shipping service was consistently assigned to the orders.

What does the process look like?

Previously, the employees had sticky notes flying all over the place with written rules regarding how to filter the orders and assign the proper shipping carrier and service. This resulted in countless lost man-hours, hours that could be put to better use.

Now, Noverstock translates the business’ requirements into an automated rule, avoiding the need for employees to remember any of the specifics. The automated tool assigns the shipping services depending on the countries, weight, price, ”dangerous goods” flag, and marketplaces and could be changed at any point to include any other piece of data.

In addition to this, the customer can now easily change any part of the carrier assignment logic.

e.g. The business uses the cheapest untracked shipping services, but at some point, the deliveries are delayed or shipments get lost, which might deteriorate the health of the seller account. The business owner can contact Noverstock to implement a change to include tracked shipping service and thus make the best out of both situations. Whenever possible he makes sure to maximize its profits, and if the accounts are at risk, he quickly acts with the push of a button. All of this is immediately resolved and the Noverstock team makes sure the business needs are communicated and met on a daily basis.

This is just one example of how this rule could be used to better the operations and results of a business. It is one of our most used tools and it is unparalleled.

After implementing our automated action, the ease with which the system assigns the different shipping carriers and services completely eradicated the human error and the losses from inefficiently assigned shipping services, resulting in an immediate decrease in related costs by 20% and a decrease in average handling time by 30%.