Yellow Satsuma Blog

As you may or may not know the online car care retailer Wax Daddy is setup, maintained and run by Yellow Satsuma. Running our own online store gives us an insight into the needs of our clients and gives us a testing bed for future development of other clients websites.

Until now Wax Daddy was run from a Magento store only but after a suggestion from a friend and some analysis of the competition and of course our continuing desire to try things new we decided to give eBay a go.

Creating eBay listings into our just opened eBay shop is a time consuming process so we immediately knew we wanted some kind of automated process. We had looked at turbo lister previously but its still a slow alternative not to mention your still repeating the input of data from the online store. We therefore decided some kind of eBay and magento integration would be the best course of action.

We set up our eBay store and made an example item using our HTML skills to have it reflect our current site design, the eBay store design tools are not the most friendly but we made something we were reasonably happy with. Then for the integration.

For the Magento eBay integration we first turned to magento connect, this is a place where all the communities Magento modules can be found. We discovered a small number of modules for doing this task, two of them looks like the ideal for us. We settles on m2e (we assume that stands for magento to ebay) and although some investment was required for this module (commercial non free) we decided it was worth trying out if at the very least we learned something for future and existing clients.

Installation of the module was smooth, it installed without hitch. We received our license key and began configuration. Initially of course we chose to use sandbox. Ebay sandbox is basically a replication of the ebay website for developing and testing on. We had some problems with ebay sandbox which basically didnt allow us to create a seller account in the sandbox environment, this wasnt because of our module as far as we could tell but an issue with the ebay sandbox itself. Because of this issue we never fully got to test the module before taking it to a life production environment but after some configuration changes we were confident it would perform correctly.

What it did for us. Well quite simply put it worked, we could now add any of our products from our Magento site either singular or in bulk to eBay items either as auctions or as buy now items. We could define which category they landed in, which store category they landed in, the postage prices it was all available and configurable for us. It was also noted that the eBay items were configured as per your stores stock, so if you had 3 of an item in stock on your site it would set the available qty to 3 on eBay. Once an item is sold on eBay the sale is imported into magento for processing in the usual way so your reports and data is always up to date. Also if an item is sold on eBay its taken out of stock from magento and vice versa an item sold on magento is taken out of stock on your eBay item. Very handy indeed.

Its still early days for us with this system and we hope it will continue to prove useful and reliable should this be otherwise we will be sure to update you on the problems we encounter.