How To List Products On Amazon With Amazon Sales Channel In Magento
Now, let’s say you also have an Amazon store. You’ll also need to sync all these catalog changes to your Amazon account. You’re already spending time working on your online store catalog, so wouldn’t it be great if you didn’t have to duplicate the effort to update or list your products on Amazon? Wouldn’t it be magical if it were done automatically for you?
Enter Amazon Sales Channel (ASC) in Magento, an extension launched earlier in 2019 and now available for the US, Canada, Mexico and UK marketplaces. With ASC, you can forget about the tedious and human-error prone process of listing your products on Amazon, and let the extension do the hard work for you. One of the byproducts of this automation is that it will free up your time to focus on your business strategy and growth.
Among many of our Amazon Sales Channel extension’s features, you have the ability to simplify the process required to list products, update their information, and/or remove them from your Amazon catalog.
Here is just an abbreviated list of what ASC can do for you.
Listing Management
Automate product listings and sync your catalog to the Amazon Marketplace using listing rules. Add specific overrides for fine-grained control of your offering on a per product level. Monitor and control all your Amazon product listings directly from the Magento admin.
Seamless Integration
Your product catalog, inventory, and order information are continuously synchronized with Amazon from the ease and familiarity of your Magento admin.
Multiple Amazon Accounts
Easily manage multiple brands and marketplace regions on Amazon from one centralized Magento admin.
Let’s look at how ASC achieves this, and how your life will be much simpler once you integrate this extension to your Magento store.
Upon installing the extension from Magento Marketplace, you will be guided through our onboarding process. One of the first and also most important activities you will need to perform is to match your Magento catalog’s attributes with those of Amazon. This will ensure your information is always syncing correctly and data integrity is accurate (you can read more about managing attributes in our Amazon Sales Channel User Guide).
After completing this step, you will then have to work on your listing rules and settings. Here is where you define what you want to sync between both storefronts. It is important to define the strategy you will want to pursue. Do you want all your items to be synced and therefore listed on Amazon? Do you only want to sell a specific subset of products in Amazon based on whatever considerations you deem best? If so, which ones? Those are questions you need to ask yourself and then reflect them in the listing rules you create during the onboarding process. Please note that you can edit these settings at any time.
Example of the Listing Rules screen
Once all the rules have been entered and the extension has processed them(which happens rather quickly), you will be presented with a listing preview. In it, you will have the opportunity to further refine and ensure things will be synced the way you want them. The great thing about this is you only have to do it once. In the future, when you add new products to your Magento catalog, the listing rules you created will kick in, sort the new products out, and sync them to your Amazon store automatically.
Example of the Listing Preview screen
You know the beauty of all this? It works both ways! That means that you can also leverage Amazon to pull information from products listed on the Amazon marketplace to populate your product catalog in Magento. Let’s say you are about to list a new product on your Magento store that you have never sold before, yet this same product is already being sold on Amazon (either by you or someone else). Then you can match the ASIN (Amazon Standard Identification Number) and have ASC pull the relevant information from Amazon’s database. Just like that, you will have the product description, weight, dimensions, even pictures, and other attributes populated in your Magento store. BAM! Ready to begin selling your brand-new product.
You may be wondering: “Aren’t there other third-party solutions that do the same thing?” Yes, of course. While there are other third-party solutions for companies looking to quickly integrate with Amazon Marketplace, ASC offers several key advantages:
1. With ASC you have the certainty and peace of mind that it will always work with your Magento instance at any given time. No need to wait for an update after installing the latest version of Magento.
2. ASC is free to download, install, use, and update.
Lastly, and to ensure you can fully leverage the benefits and features our extension provides, let’s make sure you meet the requirements and specifications needed.
Magento requirements for a successful integration:
1. Be on Magento Commerce 2.2.4, Magento Open Source 2.2.4, or a later version. Or, Magento Commerce 2.3.0, Magento Open Source 2.3.0, or later. If you are still on an older version of Magento, we encourage you to take this as yet another reason to consider upgrading ASAP.
2. Configure your Magento cron settings adequately. It is recommended to set your Magento cron to run once every five minutes.
3. That’s it! Download and maximize your reach.
To summarize, below is a high-level comparison of both processes. As you can see, we go from 7 steps to only 3. One great thing about it: ASC’s process is only done once, whereas the Amazon process is done every single time you need to make changes or add new products to your catalog. In addition, it may need to be done several times at once, one for each product category you are updating. (Each product category may require a specific category template.)
*Process may vary depending on unique circumstances
ASC saves merchants time and optimizes the efficiency of running an Amazon store alongside their branded store on Magento.
This is the first of a series of posts that will address several of the key benefits of Amazon Sales Channel. Stay tuned for upcoming articles about Automatic Pricing and Order Syncing.