Sync Shopify With eBay: Expand Your Online Sales to One of the Most Important Marketplaces!
Why should you integrate eBay with your Shopify shop? Very simple, ebay is relevant in the current online shopping world. With approximately 18 million active users (as of Q1 2020), the portal is a popular destination for goods in all categories and price ranges. For example,in Q1 2020, eBay has 174 million active customers worldwide.
eBay currently ranks third in the marketplace comparison, behind Amazon. Long story short, as a Shopify shop owner with ambitions to address a larger target group quickly and without enormous marketing expenses, you need to link your Shopify shop to eBay.
eBay is known for its numerous communication interfaces (APIs) and complex price engine. With the right plugin there is not any hurdle to sell Shopify products directly on eBay. This essentially means you have to make sure that you use a Shopify App that can do much more than just uploading products. Your tool of choice should also cover other key marketplace operations such as attribute matching, inventory and price synchronization, order import and order status updates, ideally, fully automated. This way you can concentrate on your core business instead of dealing with the connection between your Shopify and eBay marketplace.
Our Shopify App, magnalister, covers all the above mentioned processes in a simple user interface located in your Shopify backend and furthermore covers many eBay-specific functions. You can make use of our 30 day free trial to test the interface with full functionality.
eBay: A marketplace with tradition which has transformed the rules of Ecommerce
eBay has historically been of tremendous importance in online marketplace success. particularly due to the increasing relevance of Amazon, at the beginning of the 2010s, eBay was forced to make lasting changes to its business model. Until then, mainly used goods were sold privately via eBay. The business model of the marketplace was to charge a commission for every (private) sale. With the changed buying behavior of consumers,the resale of used goods has been losing importance for years and the rapid development of already established portals, such as Amazon, This opened the competition for new marketplaces and sales channels such as Kaufland, Hood.de or Etsy, so a strategic rethinking took place at eBay to stay competitive.
eBay’s auction house developed from a C2C (consumer to consumer) portal to a fully-fledged B2C (business to consumer) online marketplace. Today, commercial sellers dominate the turnover of eBay. With functions such as eBay Plus and an eBay start page geared towards new goods, the portal is moving closer and closer to its main competitor… Amazon. Even though the commercial sale on eBay is now a key focus, eBay customers can still offer new and used goods in an auction format. eBay marketplace thus offers even more possibilities for sellers and, for some goods, a wider range of offers. Aas long as the privately offered products are taken into account.
Shopify shop operators profit from eBay’s transformation into a commercial marketplace
The fact that eBay has become attractive especially for commercial sellers is something that you as a Shopify shop operator can benefit. After all, you are selling your goods to your customers directly from your shop with the intention of making a profit. So, it is obvious to offer your products on the third largest online marketplace. Because, similar to Amazon, there is hardly a product that you can not offer on eBay (a list of prohibited items can be found here).
Basically, eBay offers a full range of products (except for food). As with all marketplaces, there are certain top categories in which particularly high sales are generated. These are among the top categories in eBay:
- Fashion, including T-shirts, shoes, trousers, dresses, skirts, sweaters, accessories, and underwear
- Home & Garden, including indoor and outdoor furniture, household appliances, pet supplies, baby products, and smart home products
- Electronics, including smartphones, communication devices, computers, tablets, TVs, home entertainment devices, and gaming products
- Car & motor vehicles, including spare parts, tyres, motorcycle parts, car tuning products, and original accessories
- Leisure & Sport, including toys, sports articles, musical instruments, travel products, model-making goods and handicrafts, as well as artists’ supplies
- Collectables & Rare items, including antiques, art, coins, and stamps
- Business & Industry, including products for the agricultural, forestry, construction, electrical engineering, catering, logistics, metalworking, and office sectors
As you can see, except for the category “Collectables & Rare Items”, the eBay catalogue contains mainly product categories in which the commercial sale of new items is possible without problems and is well accepted by buyers. In addition, eBay,similar to Amazon with its business platform Amazon Business,offers B2B customers the option to sell certain products at net prices and to purchase them as part of a business purchase. eBay solves this with a filter function that allows for only B2B offers to be displayed. So, if your Shopify shop is geared towards B2B buyers, there is nothing to prevent a sale of your Shopify product on eBay.
Use international eBay marketplaces as a Shopify sales channel
The international eBay infrastructure offers you the optimal foundation for expansion as the marketplace is also represented in many other European countries such as Great Britain, Italy, Austria, France, the Netherlands, China and Australia.
With the magnalister eBay integration for Shopify you can easily connect all globally available eBay branches to your webshop. Simply add a separate eBay connection for each country you want to sell in and configure it for international sales with just a few clicks.
Learn more about international trade from Shopify with the magnalister app in this article.
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The core functionality of the magnalister Shopify App for eBay
1. Product Upload: Upload items directly from Shopify to eBay
- Upload individual products or entire categories
- Product customization before submission (e.g. title, description, pictures)
- Clear presentation of the products prepared for eBay in the “Upload” tab
- Choice of different auction models (e.g. “fixed price” or “auction for increase”)
- Variation of bidding periods for auctions
- Select payment methods at item level
- Submit product status
- Activate options like “Suggested Price” and “eBay Plus”
- Set the start time of the offer
- Category matching and matching of optional attributes
- Determine shipping prices, times and service providers
- Use shipping profiles defined in the Shopify Shop
- Define return conditions
- Offer articles explicitly to B2B buyers
2. Attribute matching: Match product variations and features between Shopify and eBay
- Automatic comparison of Shopify attributes to those of the eBay catalogue
- Additionally: Option to manually assign ebay values to the corresponding shop values in Shopify
- Increase visibility on eBay search through filterable offers (e.g. for a shoe: size or colour)
3. Synchronise price: Submit prices individually or fully automated from Shopify to eBay
- Automatic synchronisation of current product prices between Shopify and eBay.
- Deviating prices on the eBay marketplace via percentage or fixed price premiums and discounts
- Percentage or fixed surcharge or discount also on the auction starting price and the buy-it-now price
- Activation of the “Price suggestion” option for articles without variations
4. Inventory synchronisation between Shopify and eBay: Always show real-time Shopify stock levels on eBay
- Shop inventory is automatically submitted to eBay
- With every order in Shopify, the stock on eBay is automatically reduced by 1
- With every order on eBay, the stock in Shopify is automatically reduced by 1
- The foundation is always the database of the shop system, which guarantees that merchandise management systems connected to Shopify can also be synchronised
- Inventory synchronisation can be deactivated optionally in the magnalister plugin
- Zero stocks can be marked with the eBay status “Out of stock” and thus maintain the product ranking (only for “Valid until revoked” offers)
5. Automatic order import: Import eBay orders from and manage them within Shopify
- Orders on eBay are submitted to Shopify
- The eBay order number is also imported, so that orders can be assigned and selected easier
- Import of shipping and payment method
- Email templates to contact customers directly and inform them about the status of their order
- Combining orders from the same buyer (optional)#
6. Synchronise Order status: Send the order status from Shopify to eBay (e.g. “shipped”)
- Automatically submit order status changes like “shipped” or “cancelled” to eBay buyers
- Provision of tracking information such as shipping service provider and tracking number
7. Interface customization: Customize the magnalister plugin to your needs via hook-points
- For example customized product descriptions or custom fields in the order information when importing orders
- Note: Programming skills are required to use hook points
Experience all the features of the magnalister interface in detail in a free on-screen tutorial from magnalister.
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Expand your marketplace sales with magnalister with other portals
With the magnalister plugin you can not only integrate the eBay marketplace and all globally available eBay branches with Shopify easily. In addition, the biggest national and international online marketplaces can be connected to Shopify with just a few clicks. Currently, since July 2020, we offer the following interfaces:
- Amazon (DE, AT, FR, ES, IT, UK, USA)
- Rakuten (FR (formerly “Priceminister”))
- Kaufland
- METRO Marketplace
- Etsy (worldwide)
- Check24.com
- Ricardo (Switzerland)
- idealo
- Cdiscount (France)
- Hood.com
Make use of our 30 days free trial and test the magnalister plugin for Shopify with full functionality. Get a screen training worth 199 Euro free of charge. You will receive further details after registration.
