eBay and Shopify have announced that Shopify merchants are going to be able to list and sell their products on eBay directly from their Shopify account.
This is no half hearted listing integration but a fully fledged management tool reminiscent of how eBay sales can be managed with Magento. Shopify merchants will be able to immediately sync inventory information such as product title and description, item specifics, price and quantity from Shopify to eBay. Customer orders will also be imported to Shopify and allow merchants to fulfill orders from both platforms in one location. Even messages from buyers on eBay will be visible within Shopify so their sellers won’t miss any important communications.
“eBay is focused on delivering the best choice and selection of inventory to buyers across the globe. This new integration with Shopify will bring even more great products to eBay buyers, while offering Shopify merchants the ability to seamlessly drive their business and brand at scale by tapping into our vibrant marketplace.”
– Bob Kupbens, VP of Global Trust & Seller Experience, eBay
The eBay channel joins the list of other Shopify sales channels, including Amazon, BuzzFeed, Facebook, Pinterest, Messenger and retail via Shopify’s Point of Sale. These integrations are possible because of Shopify’s Sales Channel Platform, a collection of APIs that can be used to add commerce to any site, app, or platform.
The full integration is expected to go live in the Autumn, initially to US merchants selling domestically in the US, but then opened up to Shopify users and eBay platforms around the world. Shopify say that more than 60% of their merchants sell in two or more channels and eBay is a natural fit and it makes sense to synch inventory with your Shopify website.
The reason this is such a blinder for many eBay merchants is that Shopify could potentially soon replace your need for multichannel management software. You can already have your Shopify website and sell on Amazon. Add eBay into the mix an if you can manage the two channels on Shopify alongside your website sales your need for a multichannel solution may be limited to when you expand to channels Shopify don’t already support.
5 Responses
eBay integration sounds good, but I wasn’t aware that Shopify ‘natively’ integrated with Amazon in the UK, I thought this was a feature just for US stores (at least those with USD as their primary currency), I know there are plenty of 3rd part multi-channel providers who provide this integration service separately – perhaps someone with more knowledge than me can clarify if this Amazon integration is already an option for UK Shopify merchants? Thanks.
Thanks Dave, that’s what I suspected, I’m guessing Shopify will eventually provide this type of ‘all in one’ solution for Amazon/eBay integration for the UK, but perhaps it won’t be happening that soon, in the UK at least.
I’ll stick with my Magento/M2E Pro for the minute and keep an eye on how Shopify marketplace integrations develop.
This has been coming for a while, but it’s interesting seeing and hearing about its development. The marketplace arms race between Shopify and Bigcommerce continues.
Solutions like ours already enable Shopify customers to integrate their existing Shopify product database with eBay worldwide, Amazon worldwide, Fruugo worldwide, Etsy, Wayfair, Cleverboxes and Tesco. This wouldn’t be new functionality, simply existing functionality delivered by Shopify as opposed to where it’s available right now. There’s a distinction between marketplace integrators who have designed their solution to be the hub of all online sales and those like us where the shopping cart is retained at the heart of things.
There are a couple of big questions for anyone doing, or expecting to do, reasonable sums of marketplace revenue. Shopify does not intend to have any cost at all associated with marketplace sales, so long as the payment transaction takes place on the marketplace. According to Shopify you could be doing £’X’m/year marketplace revenue, using Shopify as your hub, and be paying only the $29/month (assuming no direct webstore sales). Given that Shopify needs to pay for your 24/7 support and use of the platform does that really seem realistic? All credit to Shopify if they can make that work and it remains that way.
It raises questions over the current Amazon integration in the US. The different Amazon marketplaces do have different APIs, category differences etc but if you’ve got one nailed it’s far less work to roll out integration for the rest of the world than it is to start integrating with a new marketplace. Why have Shopify decided to start on eBay rather than complete their Amazon rollout?
Shopify customers are a relatively small part of our business, we integrate with other carts and ERP systems as well as providing a standalone all in one solution that is already available in the UK with webstore and marketplace integrations built in as standard. It still tends to be start-ups on the whole using Shopify although that does appear to be changing and Shopify Plus is having some great big customer wins. Customers on Shopify who are developing increasingly complex multichannel strategies are still having problems linked to core Shopify functionality and I think it’s likely that this is what’s holding them back from global marketplace integrations. There’s no sign with their existing Amazon integration in the US that they are making any changes here (although of course that may come in the future). Magento store views and WooCommerce deployed with WordPress Multisite offer a level of flexibility that you just can’t achieve with Shopify as things stand.
I hope this comes across as balanced, I think it’s great that Shopify are pushing in this direction, it’s forcing businesses like ours to continue to innovate which can only be a good thing. I just think that at the moment what is being promised has a massive feeling of ‘sounds too good to be true’ but I’m ready to applaud it if they can pull it off.
if ebay servers are overloaded now how they gonna cope with the intergration