How to others manage selling on Amazon, Ebay and their own site?

[amyd]

Hi guys!

I wondered how other ecommerce peeps managed their selling on ebay and amazon as well as their own site.

Do you just manually list on each site, or do you have an automated system for this?

How do you manage stock levels?

At the moment we have our own site and we also sell on ebay and shoppingbank. Keeping stock is an absolute nightmare as every time something sells out (which is quite often as we have a fast turnaround of products) we then have to take that item off our manual printed stock chart, the site, ebay and shoppingbank. Which as you can imagine takes forever! We are constantly overselling and having to let customers down which is not good and desperately needs to be rectified.

I have looked into the likes of Channeladvisor, esellerpro and Giant Systems in great depth, and we're just not happy paying a % of our turnover or any high monthly fees.

Are there any other ways around this?

We need an automated way to list on all the channels - own site, ebay, shoppingbank and amazon.

We do also need a new site so it would be ideal if the new site could solve these problems. But if you know of a plugin for any site that solves the multi channel selling problem please let me know.

Many thanks!

Amy

 

[kulture]

I use Linnworks. There is a monthly fee (£29) but it is worth every penny. It is a professional, well documented system which they are constantly improving. It has a central stock inventory and you can then list the stock as many times as you like on each selling channel. As soon as a sale is made on one channel the stock count is reduced on all.

You can pay double that and use their online service, which I believe includes a listing tool as well, but I did not go on that path.

 

[AndyP]

Forget about those , you will never succeed and even if you will the competition can destroy you in 5 minutes due to fraudulent system of feedback they have.
If you go as a seller you are being exposed to all kind of dishonest buyers who will rip you off and you will be silent because you do not want bad feedback .
Build your own network, work of social and business sites. Be patient and network as hard as you can.
E commerce is great same time it is explored by big predators and quite large group of thief who are covered by predators policies to screw all sellers as long as their so called buyers do not get exposed.
Stay away from Pay pal they are arm of E Bay and same policy, which means no policy no answers just whatever is good for them is good for you. They will hold your money as long as they want, and will cover up all critical information related to abusers who do repeat their deals under new names or same.
Alert pay, I never used but I am setting up now.
But best is TT, western union or credit card.
I know there is a small group of bad sellers same time they are outnumbered by 100-1 by bad buyers.
Peter

What utter rubbish! Have an opinion by all means but at least have one that makes some sense. This, frankly, is just incoherent rambling.

 

[berts]

i'm presuming that you have some sort of offline stock system to keep track of stock for your accounts. Ideally you can export your stock levels from this automatically and then import them into your website database, again automatically. We do this every 30 minutes so the stock on our websites is relatively accurate. We carry stock of over 6000 products so its not possible to do this manually unless i employ a small army of people!!! If you manage your stock through your website database then you dont need to worry about importing / exporting stuff - it just depends what sort of accounting system you have in place.

Our website also automatically generates a product feed that can automatically be imported into amazon, google base and kelkoo. You can setup something called a cron job on your webserver, which will run a script at the same time each day.

Our web system is something specifically developed for our company, so it cant be purchased anywhere. However i dont think it would cost you much to get a developer to do something similar. Essentially it is just exporting database fields to a csv file, which if you know a little bit about programming stuff is relatively simple.

Does shopping bank generate much business for you ? They contacted one of our companies, but wanted over £2000 just to list the products on their site, which quite frankly i found ridiculous.

 

[paretowasright]

Forget about those , you will never succeed and even if you will the competition can destroy you in 5 minutes due to fraudulent system of feedback they have.
If you go as a seller you are being exposed to all kind of dishonest buyers who will rip you off and you will be silent because you do not want bad feedback .
Build your own network, work of social and business sites. Be patient and network as hard as you can.
E commerce is great same time it is explored by big predators and quite large group of thief who are covered by predators policies to screw all sellers as long as their so called buyers do not get exposed.
Stay away from Pay pal they are arm of E Bay and same policy, which means no policy no answers just whatever is good for them is good for you. They will hold your money as long as they want, and will cover up all critical information related to abusers who do repeat their deals under new names or same.
Alert pay, I never used but I am setting up now.
But best is TT, western union or credit card.
I know there is a small group of bad sellers same time they are outnumbered by 100-1 by bad buyers.
Peter

Mods can you remove this dreadful post?

 

[gavin_d]

Is this the real Dragon lol?

 

[oliverbanks]

Is this the real Dragon lol?

Yes, yes it is.

 

[preciousbags]

This is actually a very good question.

I have also been running a site for a while now and recently started listing on eBay - (i dont have much feedback so sales have been hard to get, but i am looking at a gradual increase over time)

I am also on the verge of listing on amazon and will have a stock inventory of 1000 products by the time i finish listing them all. That may increase during the near future too.

I will keep an eye on this thread as i am looking for something similar in terms of stock management.

Thanks

 

[akhtarkasia]

We created own own system inhouse, and it works very well for us. Its not just the stock system, we collect all our orders, and also we are able to scan and pack and carry out dispatch and notify Amazon and Ebay that item has been dispatched. We run 2 sites, Ebay Shop and Amazon inventory. We have over 60,000 products within our catalogue and tgry and syncronise 14 warehouse stock. Now thats't efficiency.

Pter Jones comments are absolutely RUBBISH.... people please ignore..

Eseller Pro etc.... are very expensive......

 

[AndyP]

predator is not enough to say.
Those companies have some very unique system of so called feedback which does encourage so called buyers to steal from sellers.
I have the evidence and can very easily prove my point.
If the company states that buyer can lie and steal, and that is OK, than this is counterproductive for E Commerce. They can fix their feedback if it is bad, same time even if they know that buyer is not honest they will still cover up.
The system of feedback which is presented by those companies is nothing more than invitation to criminal behavior. Since buyers have no defense we try to bribe the positive feedback to stay on and sell more.
I am for full disclosure for both sides , for buyer and seller, and if anyone is dishonest than law should take care of that person.
One day all those who got ripped off by dishonest buyers will organize and the problem will be resolved once forever.
Build your own network, set honest rules which do reward, great buyers and eliminate bad ones.

Did you forget to cover the plug sockets with tin foil last night? And always turn your TV to the wall at night....you wouldn't want those pesky rays coming out the screen and getting into your head when you are sleeping. Oops, too late!!

 

[AndyP]

Yada Yada Yada

 

[kulture]

We should stop feeding the troll and concentrate on the O/P question. It is a very real problem.

 

[patrick47]

Hi there,

hopefully i can be of some help.

We sell on Ebay, Amazon, Pixmania (V.soon) and through a Webstore. If you havent already guessed we use Channeladvisor.

It was a good move, we now can create single listings and have them display across 3 marketplaces and our own site, it keeps track of stock (You just allocate stock to each marketplace and it stops showing when its run out)

Another thing which saved a lot of time is how orders are collected in 1 place, instead of constantly jumping between seller central, selling manager pro etc, its all dumped into 1 screen with all invoices adopting the same layout. This makes it easier for packing and for your brand as you'll be consistent. This feature also makes Customer service much easier, if you have someone call up with a problem you can track orders in 1 window (and if you use your own order numbers, instead of listing no.s etc) its quicker again. Also this helps a lot for reporting, you get various pie charts etc for cross channel stats etc, (How is ebay performing compared to amazon etc)

But the downers, it can get expensive. They offer many features which they call "modules", they are effective in their own right, you can have CSE, PPC modules etc which help track conversions with your advertising, but modules cost £200-400 p/m and you get tied into a 12mnth contract with each of them.

People get hung up with the fact you have to pay commission on every sale, this is correct but these same people dont realise how much work they are saving. The chances are since theyve had channeladvisor or similar they have grown a lot, this is purely because you have more time to advertise and be pro-active, you are not sitting there copy and pasting bits of listings constantly.

We have 1 person full time creating listings, and uploading into CA, if we had to create different listings for each marketplace and our website we would need at least 1 or 2 extra staff. However realistically CA could and will cost the same as employing an extra member each year. But it leaves you to get on with growing your business.

They offer Webstores, so basically a website which is automatically integrated into Channel advisor, there are two levels a fairly basic "Basic Webstore", this is all run from within CA with a CA checkout. We had this site and whilst aesthetically it looked good it struggled to convert orders, i think this was down to the tedious checkout system. Finally they offer "Premium Webstore", this is based on the asp.net cart and is developed by external developers and then linked back into CA, this is ok, however there are still certain restrictions as it has to integrate into CA. (Personally if you are at this stage, id consider going alone and creating your own website and linking back to CA through some API or something, otherwise you'll pump a load of money into a website only to want to go alone a couple years down the line as you dont feel you need your Website in CA)

Be strict, haggle and you should get what you want. Dont settle for their standard terms and prices.

 

[kulture]

As I said before. I use Linnworks. It does much of the above but costs just £47 a month. No commission on sales and no fixed contract. It does have a listing tool called linnlive, but it is the only part not documented!

So it is a central stock control, central order processing, common format invoices across all sales outlets, one stop solution to your problem.

Looking at it I suspect it grew from EBAY, and interfaces to Ebay, Paypal, Amazon UK, USA, Germany, France and Japan! It also interface to Magento and has good import/export tools to automate interfaces to other carts.

I have used their support initially as setting up correctly is important, and found the support to be excellent and fast.

 

[amyd]

Does shopping bank generate much business for you ? They contacted one of our companies, but wanted over £2000 just to list the products on their site, which quite frankly i found ridiculous.

Hi, Thanks for the info! Regarding shopping bank - no, they don't generate much business at all. We probably come out with about £500 profit over the whole year. If you do decide to go with them though, you can definitely get that price down. We pay £300 for listing up to 1000 products and that's paying 7% commission on sales (not the 10% that they try and get you signed up on).

 

[amyd]

Hi Kulture, thanks for taking the time to post. I'm looking into Linnworks right now!

Hi Patrick47 - thanks for your post. We did look into channeladvisor a while ago, I think the reason we didn't end up going with them was due to the limitations of the premium web store, like you say, as well as the hefty fees. I seem to remember having a different site integrated into channeladvisor being problematic, but maybe I should revisit this. If you don't mind me asking, how much do you pay? If I know what I could get it for that would help.

 

[ca_jamesscott]

Interesting thread - I enjoyed reading!

If anyone would like to find out more about ChannelAdvisor - our technology and our people - then you have a great opportunity in a couple of weeks at our annual ecommerce conference.

http://www.channeladvisor.com/catalyst/eu

I hope a few of you can make it!

James.