Advice on migrating Amazon listings to eBay?

Selling on Amazon
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1

Is there an efficient way to list my Amazon FBM inventory on eBay? I’ve been looking at various listing services, and so far the one that sounds most promising – for what I want to do – is Inkfrog. Has anyone used that?

I am 100% FBM and have never done a file upload – and that is not how I want to list my inventory on either platform going forward, either. I also do not want to do multichannel fulfillment or sync my Amazon and eBay accounts so the listing service updates quantities or generates an order.

No, all I want to do is transfer a portion of my current Amazon listings (all done one at a time, never by file upload) to eBay. It looks as if Inkfrog can connect the two accounts, but reviews also indicate it might not work very well.

I sell mostly used books, and for most SKUs I have only one copy, with its own individual description – and usually its own photos that we have taken and posted with the Amazon listing.

I have tried to figure out how first downloading my Amazon inventory as a .csv file could start the process, but I’m not sure where to go from there (I’d like to avoid using Excel because I just really despise it). I also understand that doing what I need to do will take some work, which I’m willing to do, and learning. But I sure could use some advice on the best way to accomplish the task.

@Image @oneida_books

2

Once you get things listed, the biggest issue you will probably have is inventory control since you may only have one copy of each volume (generally anyway).

I have over 4000 ASINs on Amazon but only about 1000 listngs on eBay since they take so long to build out-- same issue that you have!

I found a service called Ordoro for INVENTORY control (I don’t get any money or credits from them) and it costs me about $300/month to synch my Amazon, eBay, and, another site that I sell on so that I don’t oversell.

I’m TRYING to synch up with a newly started Shopify site as well but am going crazy trying to get that to work.

3

Your point about inventory control is correct. We used to list on Amazon, Half.com and Alibris, and we had to stay on top of deleting things on the other two when an item sold (Alibris was horrific about not updating our inventory even after we’d deleted something, which was one reason we dumped Alibris long ago).

However, I’m a very small seller, plus I don’t plan to cross-list every single book to eBay, just a portion. Frankly, sales have taken such a dive in recent years that deleting things from the other site probably won’t be much of an issue for me. :joy:

4

I might be misremembering, but I think @Pepper_Thine_Angus might have experience with Inkfrog.

5

Yep, We had experience with InkFrok (or “inky” as we called it internally).

Slight Negatives:

  • Slight learning curve to set up
  • Slight terminology to learn
  • Only works with ebay paid stores (or did, may have changed)

Big Positives:

  • Once set up was FLAWLESS
  • Amazon becomes your “master” inventory list.
  • Can build in an inventory buffer. AKA if Amazon says I have 6 in stock, Inkfrog allows you to do a calculation to = your ebay stock (Amazon-2=ebay)
  • seriously worked all the time without fail

I honestly can’t recommend them enough

6

Another note. Inkfrog DOES have an MCF Option. WE NEVER USED IT. We just had ebay handle ebay orders and Amazon handle Amazon orders. We were 99% FBM, so we just printed and processed ebay and Amazon orders as they came in as normal. All we used Inkfrog for was inventory “sync” once it was set up!

7

Thanks for the ping.

We were looking for an automated way to list items on eBay, we have been on the site since before the year 2,000 I think we joined in 1999.

Used to use the tools on eBay but they evaporated years ago. We would rather upload flat files. Since we are Yankee Frugal, we do not want to pay for a service.

For now, we simply open two windows, one with Amazon and our listings, the other with the Ebay create or duplicate listing. Off we go, copy and paste.

Only done a few items that scrapers were lifting from AZ at twice our price. Sales have gone well for the items we added. (Not books but items we manufacture.) Works for now.

If you don’t like Excel, and I understand that, you can use Google Sheets. We have with success, for shipping templates and flat files for listings on Amazon. Though most our work is done with Excel, since I have a tech that crunches that for us inhouse.

Inventory does not affect us since we can do on demand manufacturing when orders come in FBus. (FBM)

8

I just posted to your other post about opening a shopify account, so this will just be the tl;dr on that.

Marketplace Connect is the app I use. Free for the first 50 orders/month synced up, 1% of GMV after that (max $99/mo).

I make the listing in Shopify and set each SKU there. Then I find the Amazon listing and create an offer using the same SKU, with an inventory of 0. Give it about an hour, and then you can link the listings between Shopify and Amazon and it will keep your inventory syncd. I typically do about 8-10 new listings at a time on Amazon (all with inventory 0). Then the next morning, I use Marketplace connect and click on “Link Listings” - it finds all unpublished listings that match Amazon by SKU - you review them all at once, click submit, and it syncs your inventory to each listing. Then it keeps your inventory updated like every 10 min. Never oversold an item since using it.

When you create your listing in Shopify, you can then publish it directly to ebay from the same app (Marketplace Connect). It uses your description and images. You can bulk publish any Shopify listings that aren’t on ebay all at once.

9

Like you, I am a small seller of mostly used books, and also on those sites (still sell on Alibris…maybe they’ve improved in this area as my deletions take effect immediately).

But the only times I’ve had duplicate sales (maybe half-a-dozen?) over many years, was when the same buyer placed the orders on two different sites. And this happened so quickly that there was no way I could have intervened, no matter how fast I moved.

I just honored whichever order had the earlier timestamp, and a couple times I remember it coming down to seconds. (You’d think the buyer would have wondered about the nearly-identical descriptions…)

But I suppose technology can handle even “contemporaneous” orders.

10

I was thinking of trying Google Sheets. I’ve used a couple of other Google tools over the years and found them pretty intuitive. My husband handles our accounting in Excel, but anytime I’ve tried to use that program, I feel like I’ve dropped acid and fallen through a wormhole!

11

I had that happen a few times, too, especially in my very early days of selling.

I’m glad your experience with Alibris is better. We haven’t been on Alibris for a very long time, but we sold there for several years before it became far more trouble than it was worth, for a variety of reasons. We would manually delete listings, then we would get an order days later for the deleted item. I tried to get Alibris to help. I was even on their seller forum and asked the moderator for help, but it was as if Alibris could not even comprehend what the problem was.

Fully half of our sales on Alibris came from Barnes & Noble, which of course no longer has a used marketplace.

Blockquote

12

Thank you so much for your advice. I haven’t seen any requirement to have a paid store, but I will look into that.

One thing that worries me about using a paid service is that if I decide to drop the service, I know it might affect my eBay listings because some of the content – primarily hosted images – might disappear. I am not planning to use their designer templates, but I would like my photos to remain.

13

Not to discourage your goal, but complaints about falling sales are extremely common on Ebay. Others have had the same recent experience that I am having, sales to repeat buyers are making up a larger than usual portion of our sales.

Giving up Amazon was not a major problem for me, Amazon is no longer a venue which worked for selling the obscure items I offer. But booksellers with a general stock are crying with pain on Ebay. In fact, every seller who sells items one would think of buying on Amazon is crying.

A warning about pictures and EBay, If you use your photos on Amazon on Ebay, and list using online links to Amazon, and auto-relist your Ebay listings, should the photo disappear from Amazon, it will disappear from Ebay. The auto-relist uses the same online link.

Also, I have found many photos I used on Amazon to have a 499 pixel longest side. (I did not make them that small). Ebay requires a 500 pixel longest side.

I moved my listings by hand, and it was not as quick as it should be.

14

Thank you for this. I’m not expecting to sell nearly as much on eBay as I do on Amazon. I have been slowly dipping my toe back into eBay with a bit of success (and a few items I’ve sold were not even media). Amazon is still the big dog in the yard. The books I’ve sold are mostly obscure, or in very high demand, or hard-to-find science fiction.

Could you elaborate a bit on what exactly “online links to Amazon” means? I’m guessing that refers to what happens when using a listing service such as Inkfrog? But maybe I’m way off…

I’m guessing that eventually we will, for several reasons, just have to add all of our photos to eBay listings individually. Currently, I’m just manually creating listings one by one and dragging and dropping the photos from our own files.

Like Amazon, eBay is a lot different than it used to be. I started buying and selling on eBay in 1999. In recent years, I’ve been only a buyer, and sadly I have experienced more problems than in the past, such as sellers never shipping an item or grossly misrepresenting a product (i.e. DOA or shorting a quantity). It’s too bad because I actually like eBay, I even own stock in the company.

15

We did pause it for a few months while moving.
Images were not effected as I believe ebay hosts them now

16

You can upload images to your Ebay listing which are on another website by inserting the URL of the picture.

If you are not providing the images from your files to Inkfrog it is probably using the images from Amazon, which have been reformated by Amazon. And might see the problem occur.

If you are using your own files, stored offline, you are going to be just fine

I have many thousands of images. I had over 20k live listings on Amazon, so the ability to use my own images stored on Amazon was a big timesaver. As was the ability to copy my descriptions from the page. I could go from Amazon listing to Ebay listing in a minute or two manually. But I can also create new Ebay listings at a rate of 60 per hour - manually.

Ebay has a lot of scummy sellers but most of them are selling products that I neither buy nor sell. If it seems like it belongs on Amazon, I buy it on Amazon.

My Ebay purchases are either cheap Chinese electronics, which I am prepared to throwaway when they fail, or items I know more about than the Ebay seller does, and I have Ebay sellers I trust for select other items.

I will not post on a public forum, the number of seller scams which are common at the moment, because Ebay has not found the means to block the scams and modify the Ebay Money Back Guarantee to protect the buyer.

I never have liked a company which ran an online marketplace, other than my own. So I like neither EBay nor Amazon.

I can sell about the same amount per month on Ebay with 4.5k listings as I sold on Amazon with 20k+ listings. Since I do not need more money, there is no reason for me to sell on both sites. This was not the case when started to sell on Amazon. I dropped Ebay and my own site when I saw the results on Amazon.

I moved back to Ebay when the SIPV notices became frequent and absurd. But every day, Ebay gets more like Amazon.

17

Get an inventory manager. Using spreadsheets to manage inventory, especially one that big can be daunting.

Like others here, I use an inventory manager. I keep my photos stored on my inventory manager rather than trusting one of my sales venues. I can also move the order of the photos around if need be, or even substitute different photos at one venue without them changing at other venues.

I found using one sales venue “as a source of truth” instead of my inventory manager saved me hours of grief in managing the photos for my listings.

I only have about 400 listings. I sell mostly handmade, but also some nonhandmade products, mostly keychains. I have to watch where some listings go, so I don’t get booted from the handmade sites.

Right now I’m having a problem with one of my sales venues reporting broken photo links from my inventory manager. I’m doing a very serious upgrade on the quality of my photos over the summer.

18

Which “inventory manager” do you use/recommend? Do you mean something like Inkfrog?

19

I use Sellbrite which connects to ebay, Amazon, Etsy, Sears, Walmart, my website, google shopping, Shopify and some others. I’ve tried vendoo, horrid my opinion, but nothing else in years.

20

Thanks for your recommendation. Inventory management services are completely new to me. I took a quick look at Sellbrite and see their pricing is based on number of orders per month, not ‘listings,’ as I have seen on pricing for other services.

But I have no intention of having any third party handling my orders; I plan to continue managing my orders on my own, even if I expand to additional selling sites. I just need to list, I won’t sync inventory between sites or buy postage through an inventory manager.

So, if I signed up for Sellbrite, would I be required to have Sellbrite handle or monitor my actual orders?