24 Nov‘23
Salestio is a great tool to expand your BigCommerce store by syncing it with your eBay account. Today we will provide a beginner’s guide by exploring the process of listing your first eBay items through the app and importing eBay orders. You might want to check our article on e-commerce platforms vs marketplaces to start from the top.
Connect the eBay account
The first thing to do after installing the app is to connect the seller account that will be hosting the listings. To open the eBay integration, select it in the top right corner. Go to the Accounts tab and click “Add Account”:
Pick a name for the account and click “Add Account” to get redirected to eBay. Agree to grant application access and get back to Salestio:
Key components of Salestio
To finish the setup, we will need to configure the following profiles. We will expand on each of them later:
- Selling List — Contains a list of products connected to eBay by Salestio. Only items added to this list can be updated (also automatically) by Salestio
- Global Profile — Configuration related to Quantity and Price. Global Profiles are shared across eBay & Amazon integration
- Ebay Profile — Special settings related explicitly to eBay integration, like listing duration, shipping details
- Creation Profile — required for creating new eBay listings with Salestio. Contains rules on how BigCommerce product details will be converted to eBay Marketplace details.
Global Profile
This is a set of rules that defines how BigCommerce price and stock will be sent to eBay. Salestio allows setting custom stock and custom prices, adding price ratios for eBay products. If nothing is set specifically, the products will be exported to eBay with the exact same price and stock as on BigCommerce. Here on the screenshot, the price ratio is set to 1.2. It means that eBay prices will be set with a 20% markup. There is even more flexibility for managing quantities and preventing overselling. Read this post to learn more advanced tricks.
The ‘Default’ Global Profile is added after you install Salestio. You can modify it or create a new one. To create a new Global Profile, navigate to the Profiles tab, select Global Profiles, and click the ‘Add Profile’ button.
Creation Profile
Creation Profiles in Salestio is a way to create and extend eBay listing information with extra details and place the product into the correct Category on the eBay marketplace. Crafting the perfect combination of product information is key for optimizing sales and winning among the Grouped Product Listings on eBay. We go into more depth on how to gain an advantage here in a different post, please check it out if you want to learn more.
When setting up to make new eBay listings, Creation Profile is a required field to add an eBay Profile. It means that the Creation Profile should be added prior to creating a corresponding eBay profile. To make the connection between an eBay Profile and a Creation Profile, the marketplaces on both profiles should match.
Creation Profiles is located along with other profiles and can be accessed via the main menu and the Creation Profiles tab. To start adding a Creation Profile, click the ‘Add Creation Profile’ link.
After giving a name to your Creation Profile and selecting a marketplace, you should set a mapping. A mapping is a way to place BigCommerce products in the selected eBay category and provide additional attributes to the product.
There are 2 types of mapping conditions in Salestio — Product Category and Type. Depending on BigCommerce product page values and needed configuration, you can select any of them or even combine them. Then you will be able to select the needed Category for your products.
Here is how the mapping for our product looks in the Creation Profile.
After picking the eBay category, you will be presented with the list of fields. These are the attributes that give your buyers more understanding of your products. Some fields are required and some are optional depending on the product type.
On eBay, these attributes are usually called Item Specifics.
Fill out the specifics and click “Add mapping” at the bottom of the page. You can add multiple mappings to the Creation Profile, just keep in mind that mapping conditions should be unique for each mapping.
Once all needed mappings are added, remember to save the Creation Profile. To do so, just click the ‘Add Profile’ button, or the ‘Save Changes’ button if you are at the point of editing the Creation Profile.
Ebay Profile
The next is to add an Ebay profile. To do so, navigate to the Profiles tab, select Ebay Profiles, and click the ‘Add Profile’ button. Here you can select the marketplace, listing type, duration, image settings, ‘shipped from’ location, and product dimensions that allow calculating shipping.
At this point, the app supports only the Fixed Price listing type and GTC (Good Till Canceled) listing duration. More coming soon!
Remember to select the Creation Profile. Click “Allow Product creation” and select the Creation Profile. The list of available Creation Profiles will be shown after the marketplace is selected.
When all is set, just click the ‘Add Profile’ button. After that, this eBay Profile will be displayed in the list of eBay Profiles and it will be possible to select it when creating a new Selling List.
If you want to send BigCommerce products to multiple marketplaces, make sure to create a separate eBay profile (and Creation Profile!) for each marketplace.
Create a Selling List
To create a new Selling List in Salestio, navigate to the Selling Lists tab and click the ‘Add Selling List’ button.
Start by entering a name to your Selling Profile. Anything descriptive for you will do. Then you should select an eBay account and marketplace. Please note that other fields like Profiles and Policies might not be available until these 2 are selected.
You should also select a Selling List Mode (Product or Category). Product Mode allows you to add the needed products manually. You have more control over what goes to this Selling List. Category Mode allows you to add the whole BigCommerce category to the Selling List. It saves you some time by automatically adding new products to the Selling List when you update the category in the store.
The next step is to add the Profiles that we discussed above. If some of the created Profiles are not displayed, make sure that the correct marketplace is selected.
Then you should add Business Policies. This is a set of rules that define available Payment options, Shipping, and Return Policies for buyers.
Business Policies are available depending on the selected marketplace. If none of the policies are displayed after you select the marketplace, go to your eBay account, and make sure that these policies are added specifically for this marketplace.
At this point, Salestio can only show those policies that are added to your eBay account. If you have not yet added any policies, please add them directly to your eBay account. After that, they will be available to select when you create a new Selling List.
When all is set, click the ‘Add Selling List’ button to save the changes.
Send products to eBay
If you select Category Mode in the last step, the items will appear here automatically. For Product Mode, you will see an empty page when opening the Selling List. Let’s add products. To do so, click the ‘Add Products’ button. You will see a list of products from your BigCommerce store. You can do a search to find the needed products. Then select the item or items and click the arrow button to add them. Click OK after selecting all of the desired items.
Products appear in the “Not Active” status, which means that they are not connected yet. To send the items to eBay, select them in the list and click the send button:
Give the app a minute to process and watch the status change to Active. If the status changes to Error or something else, no need to worry. To troubleshoot, click on the Logs link on this product, read the error message, and try to resolve the issue. If you are not sure how to deal with a specific error, feel free to reach support through the ever-present “?” widget in the corner of the screen. Also, this troubleshooting guide might help.
By default, Salestio will continue updating all “Active” items in the background. If price or quantity changes in BigCommerce, the app will make sure to update the listing with new details.
Connecting to existing eBay listings
If you have been selling on eBay for a while, Salestio can link the existing inventory with BigCommerce products.
The first method assumes that the SKU in BigCommerce is the same as the SKU on eBay (this is how Salestio will look for matches). To link the items, create a Selling List and populate it with products as described in previous sections. As we are not creating any new listings, no Creation Profile is needed in this case. After adding the products, select them and click the send button. All of the products will be matched automatically, so check the status of the items in a few minutes.
If the SKUs are different across BigCommerce and eBay, each listing can be assigned a product from the store. To do that, open the Inventory tab and verify that Salestio downloaded the items from the connected eBay account. Look for the desired item and click on “Set Product”:
Select the BigCommerce counterpart for this listing and save changes. After assigning a product, click on “Move to Selling List” and pick one where to place the item. You can now go back to the Selling List and check that the item is “Linked”! You can now sync BigCommerce data to this listing by selecting the item in the Selling List and running the Revise Quick action. Salestio will continue to update Linked items in the background.
Managing orders
Salestio will start importing new eBay orders, and you can find them under the Orders tab.
By default, the same orders are created in BigCommerce if the same SKU is found in the store. Orders are automatically imported with customization details, more on that here.
After you add fulfillment information and mark the order as “Awaiting Shipment”, Salestio will update this information on eBay and change the status.
The full depth of order management features is best explained in a separate article, so check it out.
Try it yourself
Salestio streamlines the process of managing an eBay store. After the above process is done, you can rely on automatic updates. And when the time comes to list more items, they can be added to existing Selling Lists with no extra hassle. Ready to try it on your store? Salestio offers a 30-day free trial which you can start today by getting the app from BigCommerce Apps & Integrations.
And of course, whenever you need extra help, reach out to the team at support@salest.io or look for the “?” widget in the app.
