Managing multiple marketplaces without an integrated marketplace management tool, or trying to do so with dozens of different channel advisor / CSV files can be a tremendous challenge.  With the Big 3 Marketplaces (Amazon, eBay, Walmart) continuing to increase their service level performance metrics, it’s becoming more and more difficult to compete and win the buy box.  Making sure your marketplaces are in synch with accurate and fresh product information, pricing updates, and accurate inventory is crucial to remaining competitive and achieving long term sales success.

The following tutorial outlines a number of different methods to help better manage your marketplaces, implement a new channel advisor alternative, or better organize your existing channels.  The following links contain tips, pointers, and resources for the the following scenarios:

t’s not uncommon for us to see new clients using dozens of different CSV and flat file feeds, and are overwhelmed with trying to keep everything in sync; Or, they are paying exorbitant monthly fees and feel like they have no control over their listing process.  In either case,  our tools can provide a simplified approach to :

• More control and visibility into your marketplace listings
• A desire to be able to control and mange your own listings, rather than relying on a 3rd party
• Significantly lower monthly fees without long term annual contracts
• Migrating to a new channel advisor alternative

If you are replacing your current channel advisor, then it’s very likely that we have a pre-built migration template that can get you back up and running very quickly.  Most migrations are very straightforward, and leverage existing file formats and templates that your staff is already familiar with.  Despite the FUD (fear – uncertainty – doubt) that you may have been inundated with by your previous account manager, most channel migrations are complete in a matter of hours, with minimal impact to your current listings and sales process.

After your channel migration, you will have full visibility and control of :

•   Incoming Orders routed to the platform of your choice
•   Item & inventory visibility
•   Multi-channel price control
•   Connecting to existing marketplace listings
•   Originating new marketplace listings
•   Centralized product data management (either within Sellware, or the platform of your choosing)
•   Mapping of the usual mandatory fields required to originating new listings on each unique marketplace
•   Standardize product images for use across all the marketplaces
•   Matrix items and kit support for marketplace listings and linking
•   Full rich HTML support for eBay
•   NetSuite, Brightpearl or Custom ERP integrations if needed

Sellers often come to us with a variety of different CSV files, generated from tools like:

• A myriad of different CSV files generated from their previous channel advisors
• Amazon SellerCentral bulk inventory file upload tools
• Alternative versions to eBay Turbo Lister or xls based loader files
• Walmart’s bulk item spec file
• Other 3rd party bulk listing files, like Crazylister and InkFrog

In most cases, Sellware can work with you to remap these existing files, and leverage them to connect and centralize the management of your listings and orders to a single integrated platform.

The process starts with setting Sellware as your Primary channel, and then re-mapping the column names from your existing files to our naming conventions.  Our onboarding team can assist with the mapping process if you prefer to offload the manual work of reformatting your files, and shorten the time to increase your multi channel listings.

Leveraging Sellware as your Primary Channel allows you to :

• Leverage easy to map naming conventions for most of the traditional and required marketplace fields (like ASIN – eBay Category Codes – Product IDs – UPC/EAN Codes – etc)
• Create or utilize your own custom field names when necessary
• Connect to FTP/SFTP sites for automated product data updates
• Leverage common fields across multiple platforms (images – product descriptions – variations)
• Connect warehouse and shipping solutions (like SKUVault – ShipStation) directly to Sellware
• Push product information and listing information to ANY eComm platform as a linked channel (like Shopify – NetSuite – Magento – etc) as your business grows.
• Utilize Sellware’s onboarding team to IMPORT the data elements from your existing eBay – Amazon – Walmart channels to create a single and centralized Primary channel.  This greatly streamlines data cleanup and validation across all your channels.

After connecting your marketplaces, Sellware utilizes a common SKU to connect inventory and product listings across all your channels.

Often times, an online web retailer comes to us leveraging only one marketplace and is interested in adding a new channel, but no longer has the source data or files used to create their original listings.  Or in a similar scenario, they may be listing via an ASIN on Amazon, and only have partial data available via Seller Central.  In these instances, our onboarding team can likely help you import your existing listing data into Sellware, and then use a common datasource to originate new listings on the other marketplaces.

As each of these situations is unique, you will definitely want to contact our onboarding team to see how we can assist.

The general process for importing existing marketplace listing information includes:

1. Connecting your existing marketplace account to Sellware, to initiate the data import

• For eBay, you will need to provide your eBay User ID, and authorize Application Access
• For Amazon, you will need to log in to Seller Central and Authorize our application via MWS
  • Then copy the Seller ID and MWS Auth Token into your Sellware Channel
• For Walmart, you will need to Log in to your Seller Center Account, General Settings > API
  • Create your Private Key and copy into your Sellware Channel
• For NetSuite, you will need to log in to your NetSuite Account -> SuiteTalk Web Services

2.  Contact your onboarding specialist, to have them run the marketplace import scripts that will populate your Sellware Channel.  This may take 15 minutes to a few hour, depending on the size of your catalog.  For web retailers with 1,000,000+ listings, we may have additional tools/XML integrations that can be leveraged for better performance.

3.  Ensure that common SKUs are being leveraged, to link existing listings to your items.

4.  Validate inventory levels within Sellware, to push your updates to all of the new listings for price, quantity, and product details.