How to Integrate Magento Store with eBay and Amazon Marketplaces

According to the Statista analysis, in 2020, the annual net revenue of Amazon amounted to $386 billion; meanwhile, eBay got $10 billion.

Statista

If you’re interested in a question: is it worth selling on Amazon or eBay? Let’s deal with each marketplace and its benefits separately to come up with a reasonable answer.

Benefits of Selling on Amazon

1. ✓ Enormous growth potential. hThe marketplace regularly breaks records in its performance, being long-established as a digital media and consumer technology leader. As you can see in the table above, the net profit for Amazon is growing and demonstrated a yearly increase of up to 84% in comparison with the previous year.
2. ✓ Wide audience. In December 2019, Amazon reached the point of 214.8 monthly visitors only in the United States and surpassed Walmart, eBay, and Target’s performances. The target market of Amazon is so vast that there can be a place for different businesses and your brand as well.
3. ✓ Advanced shipping and fulfillment options. The platform has one of the most progressive fulfillment processes that could be beneficial for both customers and merchants. For instance, the fulfillment by Amazon option offers more flexible conditions for sellers and allows storing products in their fulfillment centers, which helps brands rapidly scale and grow.
4. ✓ Extensive promotion opportunities. Amazon supports various options for promoting brands and products, such as a PPC model of advertising with sponsored products as an example.

We wrote a detailed case study, where among other things, we told how we implemented a product feed on Amazon for our client. In case you want to check it out: Brooklyn Popcorn Case Study.

Benefits of Selling on eBay

1. ✓ Finest marketplace for exclusive items. eBay is considered to be a perfect marketplace for vintage and rare products. However, there are a plethora of other categories popular among customers, including jewelry, computers, cell phones, video games, etc.
2. ✓ More sales opportunities for small brands. As the competitive landscape is obviously less overloaded than on Amazon, eBay is a pleasant environment for startups and independent brands.
3. ✓ Fast pay-off period. Sellers that market their products on eBay get transactions instantly once customers pay for it. In comparison with Amazon, eBay takes the upper hand in this issue.
4. ✓ Lower advertising fees. As reported by Ecom Crew, most eBay merchants don’t pay at all while they still drive sales and customers. It’s an entirely different store for sellers marketing on Amazon, who face spending the lion’s share of their turn-round on advertising.

Amazon and eBay are the places where customers tend to start their online shopping and where you can showcase your products to a greater market even if your brand is not yet widely recognized. However, if you plan to run your online store and eBay/Amazon shop separately, you most likely will get one big headache: inventory difference, product duplications, order issues, and unhappy customers.

The right thing to do is to integrate your Magento website with either eBay or Amazon and have smooth, hassle-free management of your business.

Before we go into implementation details there is one thing to understand about Magento and eBay/Amazon integration that might help you pick the right development approach: one of the systems should always be primary, whereas the other one will be secondary. It means that you should never be confused about where to look for the up-to-date data. If it’s important for you to keep track of everything on the eBay/Amazon side, then plan your integration accordingly.

Just like with almost anything related to Magento, you can create a custom solution tailored to your specific business requirements or try to find some ready-made extensions while adjusting your business needs a bit.

Both eBay and Amazon offer extensive APIs that allow communication with their databases. If you have specific business requirements, you can hire Magento developers who will help you create a bespoke solution. However, both marketplaces have so many tricky conditions and bottlenecks that it can take ages to learn all of them before even starting to create a solution.

In this situation, you will need a Magento developer who is well-versed with the platform as well as has knowledge of all the nuances that eBay and Amazon have. A developer who knows all ins and outs of both Magento and eBay/Amazon will cost a lot. Or you can hire just a Magento expert, but it will take time for them to learn about all the special aspects of eBay/Amazon. Again, it will cost a lot, simply because the learning curve is long.

Long story short — if you are not willing to spend a fortune, better look out for ready-made solutions that will save you time and money.

There are several famous Magento extensions to use for integration:

1. Codisto Linq Amazon & eBay Integration;
2. M2Epro eBay/Amazon integration solution;
3. Holbi eBay and Amazon connector.

Each of them solves appropriate tasks and can be used, but the most popular one is the M2Epro extension, and we’d like to tell you a little bit more about it.

Integrating Magento with eBay/Amazon using M2Epro

Good news to everyone! M2Epro works with both eBay and Amazon, so you don’t have to install multiple plugins on your Magento site — just one is enough.

This extension offers a free pricing plan for small merchants with $1,000 of total gross merchandise volume and varies to $999/month for $400,000 of total monthly sales allowance. In other words, you could find a suitable pricing plan for your business on the Pricing webpage.

We have worked with M2Epro on our projects too and are pretty satisfied with its performance. Some advantages are below:

1. ✓ The extension allows the simple creation and management of product listings. It eliminates the necessity of re-entering product and pricing information several times for several sites. You just need to create products and enter all the information, including images only once from the Magento admin panel to use it for all marketplaces. Also, integration helps you control product stock level since if there is a change in stock in one of the platforms it’s automatically updated on another one as well.
2. ✓ It allows the import and management of eBay/Amazon orders. All orders can be maintained through Magento admin no matter where they came from, which significantly decreases the time required for management.
3. ✓ Customized templates of the M2Epro extension allow you to create custom eBay and Amazon stores to sell your products.
4. ✓ It supports multiple eBay/Amazon accounts and various Magento stores and provides a unified interface for carrying out ecommerce transactions. This way, you do not have to log into each system or account to handle multiple stores and can make all actions from the same admin panel.
5. ✓ We’ve also kept something interesting for later — the solution supports Magento integration with Walmart, which could work as an additional sales channel for your online business.

With all the points above, M2Epro looks quite good from the management perspective. Of course, it does take some time to get familiar with the interface and understand how things are set up — just like with any other backend system. But it’s worth it.

No matter what solution for Magento integration with eBay or Amazon you choose, make sure to implement it as soon as possible because, most probably, your competitors are already doing it!