[imac]

Hi everybody,

Here I'd like to discuss our plans to integrate CS-Cart with eBay services.

I eagerly ask you to share your opinion about this issue and describe your vision in as much detail as possible.

Each product will have a separate tab for this product's properties for eBay. There it will be possible to edit the product price, specify whether the product is sold by auction or not, and define the knockdown bid.
In this tab, it will also be possible to set the number of product items available on eBay. Unfortunately, now I cannot think of an adequate solution to synchronize CS-Cart and eBay inventories. That is why these items are going to be left out of the common CS-Cart inventory tracking.

Generally, we can do it this way: CS-Cart will send to eBay the total number of product items, and if this product is sold on eBay, the total number will be automatically reduced in the CS-Cart database by the number of sold items. The main problem here is that the inventory will be changed without any visible cause as eBay orders won't be transferred to CS-Cart.

Please let me know your ideas and suggestions regarding this issue.

Most likely it will be possible to specify a custom eBay template for products that you export from CS-Cart.

Question: How critical is it to have an ability to specify a unique custom template for each product? Isn't it enough to specify the template only once in the add-on's configuration?

Question: Is it necessary to edit the product name and description before exporting to eBay? If yes, please provide examples when it is necessary.

Note! We do not plan to synchronize CS-Cart and eBay orders because this would be very complicated task. CS-Cart's ordering system interferes with lots of other CS-Cart functionalities, and we would have to rewrite too much code in this case.

Note! We will discuss the details of the integration with Amazon marketplace a bit later after we've outlined the eBay integration.

[TheLondoner]

Hi Ilya,

I think that integrating the inventory would be essential for me, I would go as far as to say that I could not use this with out it!

I would suggest that, as soon as a product is posted on Ebay, an "unpaid" order be posted into CS-Cart at the initial bid price plus postage, causing the inventory to be debited and preventing the problem of overselling products!

A new order status could be used for these orders, such as "Posted on Ebay".

At the end of the auction there are 2 scenarios:
1) The product did not sell. In which case the CS-Cart order is cancelled causing the inventory to be credited.
2) The product sells. In which case there are 2 solutions, depending on the ease of implementation. The 1st is to just "update" the original order with the actual selling price. The 2nd is to cancel the original order and create a new order with the actual selling price. It may also be useful to give these orders a "Sold on Ebay" status, but other people may want to comment on this!

A scenario that is a bit more complex is when selling multiple items via a "Buy it Now". If we posted 20 items to Ebay and only 15 sell then the initial order for 20 items would have to be cancelled and be replaced with upto 15 individual orders (it may only be 1 order if all 15 were bought by the same person!)

[dahechler]

Referencing my store www.hechlerpianoandorgan.com/store/

I am a reseller of Piano, Player Piano & Reed Organ Supplies for the Do-It-Yourself'er.

Altogether, I am a reseller of about 1000 products - which, to find me, now rely solely on the popularity within the search engines.

I also recently started selling "recut" player piano rolls - nearly 800 to choose from.

Meaning, my personal collection of rolls are sent off, as they are ordered, to the recutters to be scanned in, then and cut as new rolls. This allows my collection to reenter the public households to enjoy.

Currently, these supplies are found be the consumer search and, hopefully, finding my website.

Since practically the whole world knows and uses eBay, I can achieve a better selling and publicity status without relying on the status within search engines.

With full integration with eBay - listing, selling, inventory tracking, shipping tracking numbers, printing shipping labels, etc. - I can see my business growing exponentially.

I, wholeheartedly, vote FOR this project.

Thank you in advance,
Duaine Hechler
Hechler Piano & Organ Services

[liufuduo]

Hi everybody,

Here I'd like to discuss our plans to integrate CS-Cart with eBay services.

I eagerly ask you to share your opinion about this issue and describe your vision in as much detail as possible.

Each product will have a separate tab for this product's properties for eBay. There it will be possible to edit the product price, specify whether the product is sold by auction or not, and define the knockdown bid.
In this tab, it will also be possible to set the number of product items available on eBay. Unfortunately, now I cannot think of an adequate solution to synchronize CS-Cart and eBay inventories. That is why these items are going to be left out of the common CS-Cart inventory tracking.

Generally, we can do it this way: CS-Cart will send to eBay the total number of product items, and if this product is sold on eBay, the total number will be automatically reduced in the CS-Cart database by the number of sold items. The main problem here is that the inventory will be changed without any visible cause as eBay orders won't be transferred to CS-Cart.

Please let me know your ideas and suggestions regarding this issue.

Most likely it will be possible to specify a custom eBay template for products that you export from CS-Cart.

Question: How critical is it to have an ability to specify a unique custom template for each product? Isn't it enough to specify the template only once in the add-on's configuration?

Question: Is it necessary to edit the product name and description before exporting to eBay? If yes, please provide examples when it is necessary.

Note! We do not plan to synchronize CS-Cart and eBay orders because this would be very complicated task. CS-Cart's ordering system interferes with lots of other CS-Cart functionalities, and we would have to rewrite too much code in this case.

Note! We will discuss the details of the integration with Amazon Payments a bit later after we've outlined the eBay integration.

Question: Is it necessary to edit the product name and description before exporting to eBay? If yes, please provide examples when it is necessary.

Yes, it's necessary, eBay product name has a limited characters should no more than 55 chars, but generally for our SEO purchase I put a very long title try to cover every possible hot keywords, so that will be the key point, if your title in CSC is more than 55 chars, it won't be success uploading products to eBay.
I've been using ISC eBay marketing tools for a little while, and they have the same issue, just upload the existing products to eBay without options for you to edit before this action, so I have to edit each product on the shopping cart and make the title less than 55 chars, but I think that 's gonna be a loss for my SEO score.

The inventory tracking is still a issue that cann't be solved for the time right now for ISC eBay mobule, it shows the very first time sold history.
I uploaded a listing, inventory 30 units, I saw it has been sold more than 10 units after a few days on my eBay selling manager. But in ISC eBay module back end, it shows only 1 unit has been sold. eBay will not update the inventory and sync to shopping cart.

I'm really happy with the fact the CSC will have eBay integrated which is kind of a long term will for me. haha

Hope you guys will built a powerfull eBay module and thank you in advance.
Liu

[shiftlocked]

Well one way to do it would be to write and order importer.

So at the end of each day you can pull a standard sales report from Ebay, import that into your store so you have a record of sales etc and then that would update the inventory

[imac]

Well one way to do it would be to write and order importer.

So at the end of each day you can pull a standard sales report from Ebay, import that into your store so you have a record of sales etc and then that would update the inventory

We will investigate the eBay API more carefully in order to find the ability to create an order at our side every time a product is sold at eBay.
I suppose that the synchronization once a day will definitely cause discontent.

[Darius]

Once I were in some ebay shop, made purchase and was redirected non standard ebay checkout but to sellers website similar to cs-cart checkout.

I wonder how this is done, I would like to give ability to pay customers for ebay purchase with payment methods available on my site. Originally ebay allows just few payment options.

[shiftlocked]

I think there is an API to generate a dispatch report. If you were to run that once an hour, pull into an area on your website via ftp and then poll that, thats a bit of a workaround

You can export sales reports from ebay and put then perhaps import then. Not perfect but would be ok to start.

[tulan]

when a sell is made on ebay, then inventory stock levels must be synchronised
that is a must have important feature

it should be possible using SOAP by looking at
http://developer.eba...m/support/docs/

also, some more questions to ask regarding ebay integration...
http://community.big...?from_gsfn=true

also, if we change the product description of an item, then both the cs-cart hosted product page and the ebay generated product should both change with the updated product details.

i think one template layout will be house....it will give the ebay listings a professional feel if they look to be of the same layout.

also, i would like to only put certain products or a category of products on ebay. so i should be able to list products individually or in bulk to ebay.

i am not to fussed if an ebay order creates an order in cs-cart, but it would make things easy to handle , as you will then have one place to print off packing notes/receipts.

looking forward to seeing it implemented soon.

[klut]

I am not a cs-cart user however I have been considering moving form magento to cs-cart. Our business originally started just selling on ebay and the web site came later. During this time we have been using a pc based software Blackthorne Pro to manage the complete process on ebay.
There is a real hole in the market to provide a comprehensive ebay intergrated ecommerce platform, more comprehensive than Bigcommerce.
I suggest you download Blackthorne Pro from ebay and take a look at its features. If most of these features could be incorporated into the ebay intergration, I would move to cs-cart immediately.
There is another company, sixbitsoftware.com, who have software intergrating ebay with other auction sites. These are the guys who originally developed Blackthorne, before ebay persuaded them to move on.
Pete

[clips]

We are currently trying out another shopping cart that allows us to list directly to ebay. The first problem they have is they need a specific "ebay title" field for each product so you can put what you want your ebay title to say when the item is posted. Items you list on ebay tend to have way different titles than what you have on your site. Primarily because ebay only searches the title and our website searches the title and description.

On the other shopping cart there is not a field that allows me to change the title so that it doesn't go over 55 characters either. Right now it appears to only pull the primary title from the product. This is a huge problem as this does allow your item to be optimized during searches. Likewise, I do not want to make everything on my site to have a title like those that are listed on ebay. They are 2 different worlds and would need to be treated as such.

A good idea for this function is to also have it tell how many characters you have used while you type. This title function should probably be put in the "add-ons" tab for each item.

[simonv74]

Would be a very useful feature.

And one for export to Amazon would be great too! Add these features and the cart will be one of the top players in the market

[kickoff3pm]

I don't understand why anyone would want to buy this. If you want to list on that auction site they have all the management software you will need free of charge.
I can't see many people paying for cscart to get this feature. Most people I know who run e bay businesses are looking for away to get off it and more so each week that passes.

And doesn't it conflict with the effics of the multivendor product, perhaps the time should be spent getting that right. I mean are people going to pay a store keeper to list on their multivender site and pay the auction costs too ?

As I see it if this goes ahead as you suggest you will have two products that promise the earth and deliver Clacton-On-Sea.

[Struck]

I don't understand why anyone would want to buy this. If you want to list on that auction site they have all the management software you will need free of charge.
I can't see many people paying for cscart to get this feature. Most people I know who run e bay businesses are looking for away to get off it and more so each week that passes.

And doesn't it conflict with the effics of the multivendor product, perhaps the time should be spent getting that right. I mean are people going to pay a store keeper to list on their multivender site and pay the auction costs too ?

As I see it if this goes ahead as you suggest you will have two products that promise the earth and deliver Clacton-On-Sea.

You are missing the entire reason of why anyone would list their products on Ebay!

It is an entirely different "marketing channel" of which allows you to "also" present your products to an enormous user base following. How many people do you think shops on ebay on a regular basis?

As far as any comparisons between CS-Cart Multivendor & ebay listings, there is no relevence between them, especially until your site is generating as much traffic as ebay.com!

[Struck]

Same situation with amazon.com, by listing your products there you are now presenting your products to far more potential buyers than you will most likely ever have on your site url alone.

[clips]

Shoot, between Ebay and Amazon they are both 2 of our cheapest forms of advertising! Without a doubt Ebay has more of an affect, but when we list on these 2 websites alone, we sell more on our primary websites. A good example of this right now is we are not listing on ebay because we were working to roll products out using the Big Commerce shopping cart (which did not turn out well), and the sales on our other primary site have gone down. Once I start listing again and have auctions or buy nows ending every night our sales will increase on our websites too. We do sell the items on ebay and Amazon, but we sell many more on our primary sites. So not only can a customer buy through the ebay or amazon checkout, but the customer still has a chance to see our name. Then they Google or search for us, find our store and usually end up buying more. We have even had people show up in our brick and mortar store because they saw us on ebay!

Do I want to do all my business on ebay or amazon, not really. Does ebay and amazon still sell products and help me sell more on my websites, heck yes! That is why I want the function to be able to easily list items on ebay or Amazon and save time.

[innoteam]

Hello everyone, we are proud to announce the CS-Cart / eBay.it integration is ready.
We finished it last week, now it's installed on our servers, waiting to be tested by cscart administrators.

Regards,

Michele Amori
________________________________

Innoteam - The Content Partners
michele DOT amori AT innoteam DOT it
http://www.innoteam.it

[aussie123]

Hello everyone, we are proud to announce the CS-Cart / eBay.it integration is ready.
We finished it last week, now it's installed on our servers, waiting to be tested by cscart administrators.

Regards,

Michele Amori
________________________________

Innoteam - The Content Partners
michele DOT amori AT innoteam DOT it
http://www.innoteam.it

Will this be suitable with the Multi Vendor and if so how much is the cost of the integration.
Thanks
Lance

[innoteam]

Will this be suitable with the Multi Vendor and if so how much is the cost of the integration.
Thanks
Lance

Hi Lance,
the add-on is currently compatible with cscart community version 2.1.3
Actually we haven't yet established a price, we're evaluating it.

Regards,
Michele Amori

[AmitP]

How do administrators test this? a little more information on this would be ideal if that's okay. Does it only work on ebay.it? How much? etc etc