How can you integrate your PrestaShop store with Amazon or eBay? What is the benefit of online marketplaces for retailers? Read on to find out.
How can your online business grow and evolve? This is the question that every business owner has at some point asked themselves. Indeed, it may seem that an ecommerce enterprise can expand only quantitatively by offering products for sale, but not can qualitatively. Yet, there is a way for an online business to step up the game.
Joining a marketplace allows an online store to enter a new, global level of e-commerce. In 2018, more than half of global web sales was carried out via the leading online marketplaces, and the numbers are only expected to grow. These statistics demonstrate how promising ecommerce marketplaces are and how many customers trust them. So, why not start selling with one of them?
Read on and learn why you need an online marketplace to sell your goods and services, what are the benefits of an online marketplace and what hardships await for you if you join one. You will also find out online marketplaces are the most popular and best-rated and how to perform PrestaShop Ebay / Amazon integration.
Table of contents:
What is online marketplace?
What are the benefits of online marketplace?
What are the challenges of selling on marketplace online?
How to enter online marketplace with PrestaShop?
Top 5 PrestaShop Ebay integrations
Top 5 PrestaShop Amazon integrations
What is online marketplace?
Online marketplace, or virtual marketplaces, are large webstores that sell goods and services produced by third-party companies. The online marketplace serves as an intermediary platform that connects a seller and a customer. Marketplaces have unified policies and rules of use and charge companies a certain sales percentage for using the platform. At large, marketplaces do not intervene with how companies sell their products and are not responsible for product images and descriptions, product selection, how much an item costs and how it is delivered. What is more, there are no rigid rules on how a marketplace should be organized, and each adapts its own practices and has its own peculiarities; such variety allows businesses to find the marketplace that will comply with their specifics and needs.
The online marketplace is not a brand-new notion for ecommerce; quite the contrary, this model of sales operations have been around since the first days of online retail. For instance, the still successfully operating Amazon and Ebay were created back in 1995, Alibaba – in the year 1999, Taobao – in 2003. All four of them and other leading marketplaces that we will name in the next paragraph have come a long way to become what they are not – multinational global corporations with turnovers amounting to billions of dollars yearly, proving the validity of such an ecommerce model for B2B and B2C retail alike.
How do marketplaces work?
What kinds of online marketplaces there are?
According to the type of organization, online marketplaces can be classified into the following four categories:
- Vertical – offers items that differ from each other, but have similar characteristics
- Horisontal – sells the same kind of items that come from a range of vendors
- Global – does not have restrictions on those items to handle
- Hybrid – offers for sale own-produced items and ones from third-party companies.
Why join online marketplace?
We understand that the decision to enter an online marketplace is a serious one, and it is natural to hesitate and have doubts. In order to dispel your doubts, we compiled a list of top 5 benefits of online marketplaces that will make this business model work for you.
Best 5 reasons why marketplace will work for you
#1 Access to global markets
An online business, even a middle-level one, needs to put a lot of money and effort to try and enter the worldwide markets, and for some, these investments do not play off. Marketplaces are much larger business entities that often than not take the course on international trade, which paves your business the road to a variety of new customers.
#2 Customer confidence
Customers tend to have more confidence in marketplaces due to their size, reputation and unified policies. Such level of credibility is a wonderful opportunity for the not widely-known brand to manifest itself.
#3 Selling is easy
A marketplace is a ready-made platform for trade, with its own design, interface logic, rules and policies, which means that, as a business owner, you do not need to bother about these matters. Instead, you can skip the long development process and at once focus on your merchandise and how to sell it.
#4 Less financial risk
Since you do not invest in webstore development, joining an online marketplace is a much financially safer option. Additionally, if you are not satisfied with your performance at this or that marketplace, you simply take your business to another platform.
#5 Mobile friendly
A considerable share of customers now shop online from their mobile phones, and this number is expected to grow in the future. Online marketplaces more often than not have the already developed mobile applications, which is an indisputable advantage.
What are the challenges of online marketplace?
Let’s face it – everything has its own downsides, and so does entering an online marketplace. It would be extremely unwise not to consider the disadvantages of joining an online marketplace before making this decision. We selected the hardest challenges that you can face as you enter a marketplace.
Top 5 reasons why online marketplace may not work for you
#1 Rules and policies
Every online marketplace naturally has its own set of rules that the business owner is obliged to follow to be presented at it. Though they are usually not overly-restrictive and serve to protect merchants’ best interests, some people find working under constraints discouraging.
#2 Charges
Marketplaces make a profit by levying a fixed amount of money or a share of businesses sales turnover. For certain new businesses, the cost of marketplace membership may turn out to be a hard burden.
#3 Tight competition
The chances that will be the only vendor to sell a certain type of product is impossibly low, which means that your business will have to compete inside the platform with the number of retailers who, it may turn out, have a better reputation at this marketplace.
#4 No control over SEO and advertising
Being a part of a marketplace, you rarely get to decide how your products will be advertised and how well the product pages will be optimized for search engines. This may greatly hinder your promotion and search engine rankings.
#5 Unsatisfactory product representation
Marketplaces impose unified rules on product presentation, which leaves no place for creativity and additional efforts to make your product descriptions more impressive. Apart from this, marketplace admins are in the position to alter your product pages if they do not conform to the rules.
How to enter online marketplace with PrestaShop?
Let us imagine that you weighed up the pros and cons of joining an online marketplace and made a favourable decision. What marketplace to choose for your PrestaShop webstore? Even though this platform has no native integrations with any virtual marketplace, it is possible to connect them with custom development or via specialized plugins that are plentiful at the official and third-party PrestaShop resources.
There are plenty of PrestaShop addons that integrate the online store with the following global marketplaces – Amazon and eBay, which makes entering one of them favourable for PrestaShop store owner. Now let us learn about these marketplaces in detail.
What is Amazon marketplace?
Amazon is a multinational marketplace based in the USA and founded back in 1995. Initially, Amazon was a marketplace for books, but over the years expanded massively and became multi-product, selling electronics, apparel, software, food, toys, pets supplies, jewellery and many other categories of goods. In 2015, Amazon became the most valuable retailer in US, outperforming Walmart, and is currently the largest online marketplace in the country, with a gross merchandise value of $344 billion.
What is eBay marketplace?
eBay is a multinational ecommerce marketplace from the US that facilitates both B2B and B2C sales. What at the beginning used to be an auction-style virtual platform, evolved into the second-largest marketplace in the US, with $96 billion gross merchandise value. Now eBay connects millions of customers to retailers who sell all types of goods – electronics, fashion items, cars, makeup products, sports items and so on.
Top 5 PrestaShop Amazon integrations
Want to integrate your PrestaShop store with Amazon business marketplace? Even though there is no such default feature in this platform, it should not stop you. Here is a selection of five best-rated PrestaShop addons for Amazon integration. Discover all of them and then make up your mind on which is the right one for you.
Amazon Market Place. This top-rates PrestaShop Amazon addon allows you to easily connect your online store with the leading marketplace. Import your product features and order information either manually or scheduled and create product sheets, automate currency conversions and invoice sending and outsource your logistics with Amazon FBA. Apart from this, Amazon Market Place supports various international carriers (DHL, Fedex, UPS, USPS, etc.).
Compatibility: v1.2.0.0 – v1.7.6.0
Price: €199.99
Amazon Sync Marketplace. Install this top-rated module into your PrestaShop environment and synchronize your products and orders with Amazon account. With Amazon Sync Marketplace, you get all the basic and advanced functionalities to manage your retail like filters by price, product and quantity, markups, automatic synchronization with CRON, simplified interface for product management and many others. There is only one downside to this addon – it does not handle Amazon FBA.
Compatibility: v1.5.6.2 – v1.7.5.2
Price: €149.99
PrestaBay — Amazon Marketplace Integration. This Amazon integration solution empowers a store owner with a wide range of features for seamless online marketplace experience. CRON guarantees real-time integration of all activities, from leaving feedback to placing an order. The extension supports all major Amazon Marketplaces and is supported by the team of developers who created it 24/7.
Compatibility: v1.6.0.4 – v1.7.5.2
Price: €119.99
Amazon Affiliate Shop Import + AWS Shopping Cart. Integrate this PrestaShop module and earn up to 7% from the sale with Amazon Affiliate Program. Get the possibility to seamlessly import new products into your PrestaShop store into Amazon and manage the items as common products. The addon also includes the autosearch feature, manual and automatic product synchronization, browse nodes navigation tool and many other useful provisions. What is more, you can always disable Aws Shopping Cart and disconnect your PrestaShop ecommerce from Amazon.
Compatibility: v1.5.5.0 – v1.7.5.2
Price: €149.99
Amazon Connector. This Amazon integrating module is packed with useful ecommerce functionalities that will streamline the way you operate your PrestaShop store. The addon allows the admin to manually manage products and orders, exports, imports and synchronozation, or schedule and automate these processes. Amazon Connector is available in 10 languages and was created by a reliable development company, which guarantees the addon will serve you long and smoothly.
Compatibility: v1.6.0.4 – v1.7.5.2
Price: €199.99
PrestaShop Modules and Themes
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Visit the storeTop 5 PrestaShop Ebay integrations
PrestaShop does not have the in-built native integration with eBay, but do not let it stop you from selling your merchandise at this global marketplace. We carefully compared all the addons, available at the official marketplace, and compiled a list of five best eBay extension for PrestaShop. Choose one of them and successfully integrate your PrestaShop with eBay.
PrestaBay — eBay Marketplace Integration. Fully integrate your PrestaShop ecommerce into eBay with this top-notch addon. Get access to such features, as list items, flash actions, order import and stock synchronization. PrestaBay does not limit you in the number of accounts and stores you may have. What is more, the extension developers are constantly looking on its improvement and are adding new features to optimize the addon operation.
Compatibility: v1.5.0.0 – v1.7.5.2
Price: €199.99
FastBay – eBay Marketplace synchronization. This addon allows to synchronize your eBay account with the PrestaShop ecommerce in no time and start improving your conversion rates by selling your stock on the largest global marketplace. FastBay was recently upgraded and had its functionality extended; the developers added such features as multi-shop and multi-market management, advanced specification and category tree mapping and synchronization with Synch procedure.
Compatibility: v1.6.0.4 – v1.7.5.2
Price: €249.99
Ebay 2.0 Marketplace. This PrestaShop addon for Ebay integration stands out with its stability and reliability. It allows to synchronize products, orders and whole categories information, supports product codes and the array of international shipping providers, submit error reports to the store owner and calculates delivery rates on the PrestaShop grid. There is also a unique feature that you will not find in another PrestaShop Ebay integrations – create ads for the countries where Ebay is available.
Compatibility: v1.6.0.10 – v1.7.6.0
Price: €249.99
Import eBay – creates products from eBay listings. Get complete control over your PrestaShop-Ebay integration with Import eBay module. The extension requires no special knowledge to set up and operate, and provides you with such functionalities, as token configuration, mapper codes VAT, thumbnails and images regeneration and fields exclusion option.
Compatibility: v1.6.0.4 – v1.7.6.0
Price: €149.99
Import eBay Feedback on Prestashop. Available in eight major languages, this extension will be a great and conversion-brining compliment to your PrestaShop online store. The addon automatically integrates product comments between your eBay account and PrestaShop store; as a result, your clients will get an extra serious reason to trust your business. As a store admin, you get to decide what feedback to import.
Compatibility: v1.6.0.5 – v1.7.2.5
Price: €59.99
Wrapping it up
We hope this article was of great use to PrestaShop business owners who were thinking about entering Amazon or eBay marketplace or were just wondering how can they expand their business further. We also believe that our complete list of best advantages and disadvantages of virtual marketplaces helped you make up your mind whether to join or not. Moreover, we expect that learned a lot about top PrestaShop extensions aimed at integrating your PrestaShop with Amazon and eBay. All in all, our advice is – give marketplaces a try!
If you need help with PrestaShop development, turn to BelVG! We are professional and reliable ecommerce development company with a decade of PrestaShop experience.
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