e-Commerce advice

[Jayy]

It's been a while since I've been in the e-Commerce game myself. Have worked on quite a few stand alone e-Commerce sites but what I'm looking for here is total integration.

The channels on which I want to sell, are:-

Website
Amazon
Ebay
Rakuten

Requirements being:-

Cross platform integration of stock levels.
Responsive design / layout for the website.
Responsive ebay listings.

Ebay are basically cunts. They've got such a horrible system for normal users and store users. I couldn't believe had bad the templating system was when I was developing a template for my ebay store this time last year.

None of it is dynamic without using 3rd party plugins and websites, which all charge you. You'd think they would have this sewn up seeing as though Magento is an eBay owned company.

I'm going to go with Magento for the website side of things. Magento also has an import/export to eBay functionality via M2E Pro. - https://m2epro.com/

Problem being, I'm not sure if I built a responsive Magento site, that the push to eBay function would provide a responsive eBay listing template.

I have found another solution for that, being Widget Chimp but that's another monthly service at £9.99 just for responsive listing templates. https://www.widgetchimp.com

I DO NOT want to be manually editing individual listing code or bulk editing the code across lots of products. I've seen Widget Chimp can update all your listings with one set of edits and know it can be done but I fear with all the eBay issues over the past several months and the re-direct scandal they had, they've clamped right down on listing templates anyway.

It wouldn't even let me do a simple JS include or have any base / meta tags.

I'm just a little lost at how everything gels together between all this as I've never used this amount of integration between platforms.

Anyone else here got any experience of this?

[ripzay]

I'm a Web developer at a NW agency.. And while we have never implemented a multi-platform ecommerce system, the system to use would be linnworks.. I don't know much about it but almost all of the customers we see with requirements similar to yours have linnworks at the top of their preferred platform lists.

https://www.linnworks.com

Also.. Bear in mind that you get what you pay for with this sort of thing, if you came to us for a Web development like this you would be getting an invoice no lower than £8k - that's not to say it can't be done cheaper if you are comfortable doing the development and integration with the other systems yourseld
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Current: 2005 KTM SuperDuke 990
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Previous: 1994 Suzuki GSX-R 400

[Jayy]

I'am myself a web dev, just never worked with something that integrates all these solutions together. It seems that Magento with M2E Pro can handle most of it.

I'm not looking for an enterprise level solution here, we are a small start up at present with 2 product lines, 2 variations of each bottle and about 120 units of stock.

However, over the next 2 months, we will have 5 product lines, 2 variations of each and about 700 units of stock.

We need to be able to track all this across the different platforms and I don't want to be spending all my time updating manually, each time someone buys something from another platform.

I would rather invest some time developing something now that will scale as we grow.

[trevoriv]

When you come up with a solution I'll buy it from you!

There doesn't seem to be a decent off the shelf solution that doesn't try to rip you off just as much as the marketplaces themselves do. I've little experience of amazon but eBay can be a right pig when it comes to listing, templates and automation, its so bloated.
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[Jayy]

When you actually dig deeper in to the eBay situation, you find that they own all the best solutions which appear to be "3rd party" but they've actually signed deals with eBay.

I just tested something, generated some code from Widget Chimp, copy pasta in eBay single listing, no issues (contained loads of Javascript and meta tags).

I put 1 JS reference in there or 1 meta tag, "Sorry you cannot use JS, base href, cookies, iframes" etc.

I was even less impressed with the store customisation and how bloody complicated they made it and to be perfectly honest, since the last time I had looked at it before last year, it was somewhere in 2002 and it doesn't look like it's changed at all!

[MatthewOgborn...]

Howdy R1 Jay,

I'm Matt the owner of WidgetChimp.

I saw your comments above about the JS errors.

The answer is dead simple.

There are two forms for listing on eBay, a "basic form" for new sellers and an "advanced" sell your item form.

You can switch between these, normally there is a link in the top right of the page when you go to add a new listing (this does vary between the eBay sites though!).

Select the advanced form and enter the listing template in the HTML section, along with you item title & description and it will pass those filters.

Hope that helps you and if you have any questions, just use the help tab along the top in your account.

Matt

[Jayy]

Well that was bloody impressive Matt, finding this and replying to it so quickly, wasn't expecting that.

Assume either the power of BCF on search engines showed this thread up pretty near the top or you're using something like Buzz Bundle to monitor chatter?

Either way, cheers for the reply!

I've been a seller on eBay intermittently for the past 12 years but haven't been back on eBay since last November. I was using custom design templates on a store I had back then.

So it will bypass all those checks if you switch to advanced mode? I just wish eBay pulled their fingers out and made the whole platform better. It's alright if you're handy with code but to total beginners, it's daunting and un-intuitive.

Widget Chimp is a breath of fresh air, I wasn't slating that at all, was just saying that you probably have a deal with eBay in some shape or form?

So Matt, will Magento & M2E Pro push a product from an e-Commerce site to eBay whilst retaining the responsive capabilities of the websites responsive template or do I need something like Widget Chimp as well as, to take care of that?

[trevoriv]

BTW I did look in to this some years ago and came across ChannelGrabber - not sure what it's like though.
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