Lady thinking up ideas to improve productivity ebay seller

The Right Approach to online Multi-channel Selling

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Starting a few years ago, it occurred to me (and a few 10’s of millions of you out there – so call me Captain Obvious) that once you list a product for sale on more than one channel, you have a better chance of selling it. To that end, I took the coins I was selling on eBay and put them into a Shopify store. Then I used the “free” Shopify eBay importer. To my horror, the app ran for hours and brought in thousands of listings, all duplicates of Unsold items. In other words, a useless app. Given my background in IT, I knew this was a problem waiting for a solution, so I went to work.

A Better Way

So what did I do?  I built a “Smart Importer”. Basically, it decides which eBay items are new and unique and imports them to other channels. Although this may sound simple, on a technical level it’s quite challenging to do. Which is probably why no one else offers this solution yet. But it works better, as we shall see. Encouraged by customers feedback, the app was later expanded to include inventory management and batch execution. The result? A new and different solution to multi-channel selling . The traditional systems in place now (Stitch Labs, ChannelAdvisor, TradeGecko, etc.) are based on processing Orders. But esa Product Manager puts Products first.

So, why is this better? Productivity. Because of the automatic product linking you don’t have to spend time manually linking products or wading out duplicates. No need to press Sync or Reorder buttons. SKUs aren’t required either, that’s all handled by the app.

Here is a very short video demonstrating the app in action:

Starting a few years ago, it occurred to me (and a few 10’s of millions of you out there – so call me Captain Obvious) that once you list a product for sale on more than one channel, you have a better chance of selling it. To that end, I took the coins I was selling on eBay and put them into a Shopify store. Then I used the “free” Shopify eBay importer. To my horror, the app ran for hours and brought in thousands of listings, all duplicates of Unsold items. In other words, a useless app. Given my background in IT, I knew this was a problem waiting for a solution, so I went to work.

So what did I do?  I built a “Smart Importer”. Basically, it decides which eBay items are new and unique and imports them to other channels. Although this may sound simple, on a technical level it’s quite challenging to do. Which is probably why no one else offers this solution yet. But it works better, as we shall see. Encouraged by customers feedback, the app was later expanded to include inventory management and batch execution. The result? A new and different solution to multi-channel selling . The traditional systems in place now (Stitch Labs, ChannelAdvisor, TradeGecko, etc.) are based on processing Orders. But esa Product Manager puts Products first.

So, why is this better? Productivity. Because of the automatic product linking you don’t have to spend time manually linking products or wading out duplicates. No need to press Sync or Reorder buttons. SKUs aren’t required either, that’s all handled by the app.

Here is a very short video demonstrating the app in action:

 

The video shows an import to Shopify and then you can turn on batch execution under Auto Run which repeats until you stop it. Days, weeks, some customers don’t need to change anything for months. Very simple, but powerful. The process is similar with Bigcommerce. Etsy requires a longer setup, but once done, it’s the same as the others – hands off and you can return to focusing on your business.

I processed maybe 10-20 orders a day when I dealt coins. Took an hour or so to print the postage and mail things out. No need for an app. Now, if I had a multi-channel product where I could list once and sell on 3 channels, I would have sold more. Now you can too. With the right approach to multi-channel selling.

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