Re: Shopping cart as ebay management app?
30 Sep 2013
Howdy
eBayaholic,
Great question.
There is
OpenBay for OpenCart and
M2E Pro for Magento, but how do they compare?
I'm going to pick on M2E Pro for Magento for a couple of reasons rather than OpenBay,
The primary reason for not including OpenCart & OpenBay is because it doesn't stock control variation products properly and the extensions that enable this, break the free product loaders which renders it useless for fashion sellers or any category that supports variations.
So on to M2E Pro, this is based on Magento, so from the inventory side, you have simple, configurable (variations) and kits or bundles as they're called in Magento in that sentence we've just surpassed a couple of dedicated software products for eBay &
Amazon.
Then there is the order management side, marketplace orders (from 1 or more eBay and/or Amazon accounts) are collected and appear as orders in Magento. As we're talking every-man-and-his-dog integrates into Magento and if say your fulfilment company does not, then there are well documented API's available to allow an integration.
If we pick on
ChannelAdvisor specifically, they still have a restricted "juggler" that "shares" products across the marketplaces, where as M2E Pro (along with another provider
eSellerPro) supports the allocation of 100% of available stock to all sales channels to maximise the potential sales.
ChannelAdvisor will always have a better support system and if you're in the UK that's what you're paying the £600 +1-2% or US $1800 + 1-2% (values approximate) and a similar question was asked here that also included more specific details
lastdropofink.co.uk/forum/ever...s-channel-advisor-vs-mangento/Coming back to Magento + M2E Pro, M2E is provided free because it is subsidised by eBay and it wasn't until earlier this year that I finally got around to actually using it and was very surprised how far they had got. You have listing templates, keywords, stock control with features that surpass CA in places, a policies system to template pretty much everything and it works of the Magento inventory which is very flexible.
However, we are comparing chalk & cheese.
ChannelAdvisor is a 1st generation provider that moved to the 2nd generation when it added Amazon in ~2008/2009, the thing is there are loads of 2nd generation providers that pretty much offer the same features & functionality now, however they all have
one fundamental differenceto using Magento + M2E Pro, open source code and thousands of extensions.
If Magento which is the base system doesn't do something you want it to do, there is either an extension already off the shelf OR a close fit extension you can grab and extend further OR you can have it made to fit your needs, where as all the 2nd generation providers are closed source and you have to wait on their dev teams to get to the feature request, if at all.
Probably the easiest way of thinking about ChannelAdvisor compared to Magento + M2E Pro, one has a minimum fee of £600/$1800 and one does not.
As for
Zoovy, I'm unable to comment, no real details on their site and never used it.
Hope that helps you,
Matt