I have a prospective client who has over the last couple of years grown a small business and is selling a dozen or so items per day on his eBay store and growing.
They have a one-page website purely for contact details etc. He is seeking to put a store up on his own domain also.
Does anyone know of a PHP MySQL shopping cart that integrates with an eBay store ie. admin both from one panel?
He has a merchant account so would obviously be interested in avoiding eBay’s percentage on sales if he could sell through his own site. There would also be the consideration that the traffic on his own site is miniscule at present.
Has anyone else done this? Any pointers much appreciated.
Im a little wary of running your own software to integrate with Ebay. The Ebay API is very complicated and changes frequently. You might at least want to talk to some of the service providers like Vendio, ChannelAdvisro, Zoovy, Infopia and Kyozou.
Regrettably, I’ve yet to find any reasonable solution. The companies pbreit mentioned offer solutions but you’re generally looking at forking over 1-2% of revenues to them. I’ve talked to other companies without revenue share models (and I have no idea of the quality of their programs) and they’re $50,000+.
Ebay recently bought magento. I think you would have a good chance with magento platform coz for sure ebay will be integrated to magento in the coming days.
You may want to try BigCommerce. Their software integrates with your eBay store from one admin area that controls both; your online store and your eBay product listings.
Once you sell a product on eBay an order gets generated on your BigCommerce Control Panel so you can fulfill it same as orders from your own store. It’s an easy way to manage both from one control panel.
Go to BigCommerce’s site and click on “Tour” you will find a video that explains it pretty clearly.
You said your client wants to get away from eBay’s fees, so this may provide a smooth transition to his own store.