The Best Way to Connect a Magento 2 Store to eBay
Julie Stewart • August 19, 2021
One of the most assured ways to scale up an e-commerce business is to offer your store’s products through multiple channels. And one of the most popular channels for expansion is eBay.
eBay has over 159M active shoppers and features nearly 1B live listings. Started as mainly an auction site for small sellers and consumers, eBay now offers advanced business tools for e-commerce vendors of all sizes.
80% of all products sold on eBay are new, in the box. There are literally millions of reasons to sell on eBay, in almost every major product category. But there are certain things to be aware of. Here we’ll give an overview of the issues involved if you want to connect a Magento 2 store to eBay.
Before you start: what to know about connecting to eBay with Magento 2
Seller Limits
eBay requires a probationary period, during which a seller is limited in their number of products, and must demonstrate they will meet certain performance standards. The goal is to attain Top-Rated status as a seller. Consistently delivering outstanding customer service, as well as meeting certain minimum activity levels are the basic criteria.
- Your eBay account must be active for at least 90 days
- A minimum of 100 transactions and $1,000 in US sales is required per year
- You have to comply with eBay’s selling practices policy
You’ll be limited in both the number and total value of your listings until you’ve earned Top-Rated status. At that point you can ask to increase your seller limit. It’s a good idea anyway to start with a limited selection from your catalog instead of the whole list if you’re new to selling on eBay. A go-slow approach is easier on your budget, as insertion fees are assessed on every product listed.
Insertion Fees
Whenever you list more than 50 items when selling on eBay, with a Magento store or otherwise, you’re charged an insertion fee after the first 50 items which are free. Each subsequent item listed costs $0.30 monthly for standard sellers. Upgrading to the eBay Stores subscription, allows more free credits and the insertion fee can be as little as $0.05.
Final Value Fees
Sold items will get charged a final value fee, calculated as a percentage of the total sale amount. This includes shipping and handling charges, though not sales tax. A standard FVF is 10% of the total amount of the sale, with a maximum final value fee limit of $750. For eBay Stores subscribers, the fee is four to nine percent, with a maximum of $250 per item.
Syncing your product listings and controlling inventory
If you want to connect your Magento 2 store to eBay, you will have to work with your developer to integrate the connection. Extensions for eBay are available in the Magento 2 store, at prices ranging from $200 to $499.
These extensions function well enough, to a point. If they include a repricing tool, it manipulates price but it cannot manipulate other pieces of data on eBay like titles, descriptions, bullet points, or hidden keywords.
With the standalone apps, you have to do a lot of the heavy lifting yourself and figure out your own eBay setup with a developer. And once you move the items into your eBay account, you’ll have to manage them from there. They only sync inventory and pricing and you’re entering all the rest manually, yourself.
There are some basic listing data required to feed your products onto eBay, but just filling in the bare minimum won’t distinguish you in a product search. Apps that specialize in product listing feeds can provide better-structured and more complete product data to the eBay marketplace. This will maximize both your customer reach and your conversion rate.
A full-automation choice for connecting a Magento 2 store to eBay
When you connect a Magento 2 store to eBay with Shoppingfeed, you can sync your product inventory across all of your sales channels, operating from a single dashboard. For example, you can create new, never-sold-before products on eBay from the Magento 2store, complete with all required listing tags and attributes. This is the true value-add of feed syndication.
Besides setting up novel product selections, Shoppingfeed syncs your product feeds with all of these useful eBay features:
- Dynamic fields in templates
- Unique HTML Templates
- eBay Store Categories
- Global Shipping Option
- Custom price, return, and shipping templates
- Take over existing listings
Shoppingfeed is a SaaS (Software as a Service), meaning you also get hands-on customer support for installation, troubleshooting and more.
Besides eBay, Shopping Feed can list and sync your product inventory on over 1000 channels in 40 countries around the world. It will also import your orders from connected marketplace channels back into your Magento 2 Order Pane, and process it through your existing fulfillment software.
You still can refund, ship, or fulfill directly from Magento 2. The status will sync back to eBay, informing the customer at each step in the process.
When you connect a Magento 2 store to eBay, try a more powerful set of tools
These are things like our exclusive ProductGraph, a next-generation SEO technology perfect for surfacing products in voice-assisted searches. There are also tools like Business Rules & AutoRemove, which let you use If/Then statements to make strategic changes to your product listings. Rules can automatically remove filtered products from your product data feeds, protecting you from overselling or against tiny margins.
Shoppingfeed’s syndication extension can be found in the Magento store. You can get complete information on all the features available, along with reviews from current users.
Using the smartest tools to integrate eBay listings with your Magento 2 store is how you win more sales.
Julie Stewart
My mission at Shoppingfeed is explaining how to leverage e-commerce platforms and SaaS technology to e-merchants who just want to run their business and make more money.
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