Magento and Marketplaces. Quick guide

Magento and Marketplaces

Product listings on the marketplaces can be great additional source of sales. And Magento shop owners can fully feel beauty and ease of automated solutions! What is online marketplace? It is a website where you can sell goods in return for commission or monthly fee. Buying process is carried out by a marketplace and it’s not allowed to steal customers by puting links to your website. The world biggest online marketplaces are Amazon and eBay. There are also a number of growing marketplaces e.g. Etsy that can offer opportunities for niche traders.

eBay

Initially eBay website was invented as auction designed for wide variety of goods. Later they have added feature allowing to buy product immediately at fixed price. This has changed everything. Now eBay is much more than auction, it became one of the largest online marketplaces worldwide. It attracts visitors from all over the globe and offers great opportunities selling online for everyone. As a seller on eBay, your fees are based on what you sell, whether you subscribe to a shop and how you set up your listings.

How sell on eBay works?

1. You create a seller account
2. You create your listing
3. You ship products to customers (eBuy sends you order details)
4. After the order is shipped eBay transfers payment to you

For Magento store owners it’s pretty easy to create product listings. Everything is needed is to buy appropriated extension (feed manager / generator) and configure it properly. It allows to generate files based on your Magento catalog and choose where and when it must be uploaded. So you won’t need to create or update products manually all the time. Another benefit is that from one catalog you can create multiple product feeds that can be totally different to fit requirements of each marketplace. Most popular configurations are already builtin, but if you have very unusual catalog structure, or some of your products doesn’t contain required attribute(s) you’ll need to fix this yourself , or ask your Magento developers to implement automated data correction while file is generated. Otherwise your products won’t accepted.

eBay offers several types of subscription:

• no shop – Up to 20 listings per month free for charge
• basic shop – Up to 150 listings for $19.95/m
• featured shop – Up to 500 listings for $59.95/m
• anchor shop – Up to 2500 listings $199.95/m

You will be charged an insertion fee for each listing (from 5 up to 30 cents ). Also you’ll have to pay final value fee when your item is sold. Fee varies from 4 to 9 percentages for different categories and is calculated based on the total transaction value , but can’t be much then $250. PayPal will also take a percentage of the sale which is approximately 3% of the gross sale value.

Amazon

Created as a book selling website now it’s the largest online seller and trade platform in the internet. Amazon has huge customer base what makes him Marketplace #1 for retailers. Another benefit is that the Amazon is retailer itself (own sales are around 60% of total) that is why pretty often they improve interfaces, optimize purchase process and logic of relations between the products (cross sells, upsells, etc.) Sell on Amazon is slightly different from selling on eBay.

How it works

1. You register seller account
2. You upload listings
3. You can let Amazon do the shipping for you – or handle shipping yourself
4. Amazon transfers payments to you and notifies you that your payment has been sent

Regarding the step #2 – you can add your offers to the Amazon catalogue using feeds and spreadsheets. And there is nothing easier if your original shop is on Magento! There are plenty of Magento extensions to create/update products feeds automatically on schedule. They are called product/data feed manager. In the next article I’ll compare most popular of them.

Few tips for people who willing to start sell on Amazon

1. Certain categories on Amazon allows listings of new goods only others allow the sale of used items.
2. There are 2 selling plans. You should choose one of the following plans – Professional and Individual. The choice depends on your goal: to sell a single item or many items. With the Professional plan you can sell an unlimited number of products for just $39.99 monthly subscription fee. The Individual plan has no monthly fees, but instead you pay 99 cents per each sold item.
3. You will need to fill your seller profile, so prepare following:
   • Your logo (can be up to 120×120 pixels)
   • Text description of your shop  (will be displayed in ‘about seller’ section )
   • Shipping information (carriers you use to ship and shipping times)
   • Return and refund policies
   • Privacy policy

 

Need help with marketplaces?