With the constant increase of eCommerce sales, more and more businesses develop websites and switch to digital marketplaces. Suppose you have an online store on Magento. What does it mean?
It entails you have a powerful solution to sell products. It also means you can afford a complex platform and hire experienced developers, as Magento development is a challenging task.
Even though the platform is free (the open-source version), it requires paying for hosting and domain registration. The costs may also rise if you want to install more features or switch to Magento Enterprise Edition (now Adobe Commerce). Still, the platform is excellent for creating a unique customer experience.
You need to reach a certain turnover to get the most out of the platform. But how can you increase sales in such a competitive market? Consider selling on Amazon. In this article, we’ll analyze the reasons for eCommerce Amazon integration to marry two selling platforms and how to do it.
Introducing Magento and Amazon
Magento Key Features
What is Magento? Magento is an eCommerce platform with highly customizable capabilities. It offers an open-source edition, making it a cost-effective option for rapidly-growing businesses.
Magento has great support from around the world. Why? Because it’s open-source and unites numerous developers in the community.
The platform gives access to PHP code and lets you configure the needed solutions to meet the business needs. You can also find various free and paid extensions for the platform to enrich the store and enhance the user experience.
Complexity, scalability, and customizability. These three factors are typical for Magento. That’s why Magento features attract large online stores with significant traffic and turnover.
It can manage hundreds of orders and customers per hour without affecting the website’s performance. You can also launch the store in multiple languages and connect several brands to the enterprise.
But what if you want to expand the reach to new markets apart from the website? That’s where Amazon integrations come to your aid.
Amazon Key Features
Starting as a bookstore, Amazon has grown into the second largest shopping network in the US. It’s now an everything store. It has a powerful website, offline sales points with automated checkout (aka Amazon Go), and provides cloud computing and other services.
Even when you say online shopping, one of the first things coming to your mind is Amazon. That’s why it may be reasonable to sell products on this marketplace along with the Magento website and conduct Magento integration with Amazon.
There are three possible ways to manage your selling process on Amazon.
- Amazon Seller Central (Third Party Sellers). This option opens up opportunities to sell on Amazon.com in various regions, such as the US, the UK, Canada, and Mexico. By applying for this program, you become a third-party seller.
The two available plans are Individual and Professional. As for pricing, the former costs $0.99/item sold. The latter is $39.99/month.
The advanced plan provides additional features and lets you sell more than 40 units a month. So if you’re a Magento merchant, the Professional Amazon plan is your choice.
How can you become a third-party seller? Register the company details on Amazon Seller Central and create an account. It will enable you to control the business when entering new markets.
Other possibilities include:
- making product listings in bulk;
- handling orders and inventory with reports;
- leveraging on-site advertising tools.
You can establish shipping rules and fees or use the Fulfillment by Amazon (FBA) service. This application lets merchants send goods directly to Amazon warehouses and leave packaging, shipping, and customer service to Amazon.
- Amazon Vendor Central (First Party Sellers). This program involves acting as a supplier and selling in bulk to Amazon. Then, the marketplace resells the products under its name and adjusts pricing according to the market. It’s an invitation-only platform, so Amazon should get interested in what you sell to offer to be its vendor.
- A hybrid option. This option combines the benefits of both Seller Central and Vendor Central accounts. For example, you can preserve control over the goods, streamline shipping and fulfillment, and access premium marketing features.
Whatever you choose, Magento’s technical integration with Amazon can be simple, thanks to the open-source nature of the platform and the range of extensions on the market. Let’s consider how to connect the store to the Amazon account and do the Magento integration with Amazon.
2 Ways to Perform Magento Amazon Integration
Magento (Adobe Commerce) Marketplace contains numerous tools and extensions. Some of them make managing the Magento Amazon integration simple and smooth. Such functionalities let you link the Magento Admin to the Amazon Seller Central account to extend the offerings of the Magento store.
Below we’ll cover two apps to easily establish an Amazon-Magento connection. These are native applications from Magento (Adobe Commerce) and CedCommerce, an Adobe Bronze Solution Partner. These solutions are designed to co-sell and give better user experiences after Amazon marketplace integration.
1. Amazon Sales Channel by Adobe Commerce for Magento Integration with Amazon
Magento (Adobe Commerce) offers a free add-on called Amazon Sales Channel for Magento Amazon integration. It connects to Amazon as a native app, exposing the store to millions of new customers from the US, Canada, Mexico, and the UK.
This app provides a simple direct Magento integration with Amazon. As a result, you can manage Amazon sales directly within the Magento admin and maintain consistency in product listings. Other features are as follows:
- advanced pricing rules to automatically match or surpass your competitors’ prices and get the Amazon Buy Box;
- the ability to fulfill orders by yourself or by Amazon (FBA);
- setting B2B sales rules to change the prices depending on the number of purchased goods;
- syncing the inventory levels to launch marketing campaigns based on the sense of urgency to boost Amazon/Magento conversions;
- the currency conversion tool.
Price: the app is free, but you need to create an Amazon Seller Central account for $39.99 per month. You should also have at least the 2.3 or 2.4 Magento (Adobe Commerce) version for successful Magento integration with Amazon.
2. Amazon Integration by CedCommerce
One of the notable extensions from a third party is the Amazon Integration by CedCommerce. It’s a solution to automate the selling process and succeed in Magento Amazon integration to get a unified picture. It allows you to synchronize products, prices, and orders without changing the Amazon and Magento systems’ core operating features.
You can create Amazon categories and their properties on the Magento 2 store. And it will be easier to configure products and submit them to Amazon.com. Besides, you can automate and improve the selling experience with Amazon FBA. These include Magento Amazon FBA, Magento Amazon Fulfillment, Magento Amazon Feed, and others.
Here are some other appealing features:
- Product Category Mapping. It means retailers can associate many categories of the Magento 2 store with a single Amazon category, streamlining navigation for customers and giving merchants access to changes in one click;
- Profile-Based Product Upload, allowing you to create an account and add products to convert the categories and properties from Amazon to Magento 2;
- Bulk Products Upload to add all products simultaneously;
- Low Stock Notifications, informing when the number of products drops to a certain threshold for merchants to intervene and replenish goods to avoid stockouts;
- Rejected Products Notification, telling about the reasons for removing products;
- New Order Notifications upon receiving an order from Amazon;
- Synchronized Inventory and Profile-Based Pricing to match two platforms without updating figures manually every time;
- PII Compliance to protect data, such as names, addresses, contact details, and email addresses, in line with the Amazon Marketplace Data Protection Policy.
Price: depends on the Magento version and service agreement duration. Make sure you have at least a 2.3 or 2.4 M2 version. Here is the price breakdown for Amazon Integration by CedCommerce:
- Open Source (Community Edition): $499;
- Commerce on prem (Enterprise Edition): $699;
- Commerce on Cloud (Enterprise Cloud Edition): $899;
- 6-month service agreement: $90;
- 9-month service agreement: $120;
- 12-month service agreement: $180.
Conclusion
The more prospects move to online shopping, the more competition intensifies. As everyone now tries to succeed in the digital environment, having a wider audience from a well-known platform like Amazon is beneficial for expanding businesses. It’s not just a helping hand to your online store. It’s even more.
According to statistics, Amazon is now second only to Walmart in the number of users. Amazon has 98.07 million monthly users compared to Walmart’s 120 million. 89% of respondents also claim they would rather buy from Amazon than from other online stores. So why not connect your website to this eCommerce giant?
Thanks to connecting to Amazon, retailers can quickly expand their business operations and cultivate a following of devoted customers. Magento Amazon integration can increase sales. Such investment in Magento integration with Amazon will pay off handsomely for an online retailer in the form of new customers from various regions.
Utilize tools to save time on creating solutions from scratch. However, some things, such as strategic management, inventory control, and resource management, can become a heavy burden for your team during the Amazon Magento syncing process. So you may want to employ Magento support and Magento Amazon integration services.
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About the Author:
Alex Husar, chief technology officer at Onilab. For over 8 years he’s been working on Magento migration and development projects as well as building progressive web apps (PWAs). Alex is an expert in full-stack development who shares his expertise and in-depth knowledge of modern technologies and Computer Software Engineering.