21 Jan‘23
Starting from January 1st, 2023, Shopify’s free eBay app will no longer be available, leaving many merchants searching for a suitable alternative. One of the major challenges faced by sellers is the inability to update eBay listings created with the Shopify eBay App using other applications. Attempts to do so often result in the error message “Inventory-based listing management is not currently supported by this tool.” In this article, we will unveil an effective solution to this problem with Salestio’s Ebay Integration for Shopify. Salestio allows merchants to seamlessly manage their eBay inventory and listings, making the process of running an e-commerce business more efficient and profitable.
Introduction
Starting from January 1st, 2023, Shopify’s free eBay app will no longer be available, leaving many merchants searching for a suitable alternative. The discontinuation of this app has brought to light the need for an efficient and reliable solution to manage inventory and listings on eBay.
One of the major challenges faced by sellers is the inability to update eBay listings created with the Shopify eBay App using other applications. Attempts to do so often result in the error message “Inventory-based listing management is not currently supported by this tool.” This can be a major hindrance to the success of an e-commerce business, as it makes it difficult to maintain accurate inventory levels and pricing on the listings. Why this happens? Because the Ebay app by Shopify was using a modern API from ebay called Inventory API. This is an awesome tool but it’s not compatible with the previous generation of API connection. Another pitfall is that the new inventory API does not yet support all necessary features available with Trading API.
The suggested solution, in this case, stops listing it on ebay and relists it from other solutions. Very often this is not the case, because sellers will lose a sale track for ebay listings, and also users that watching for listings will lose this record.
In this article, we will show a way how Salestio gives merchants the possibility to continue automatically updating existing ebay listings created with Inventory API.
We will provide a detailed guide to migrating listings from Ebay under Salestio’s control. And highlight how listings with Ebay Inventory control could be managed by Salestio.
By the end of this article, you will have a better understanding of how Salestio’s Ebay Integration for Shopify could help you with managing your existing listings and grow your business.
What is Salestio’s Ebay Integration for Shopify?
Salestio’s Ebay Integration for Shopify is a powerful tool that allows you to connect your Shopify store to your eBay account, enabling you to manage your inventory and listings on both platforms in real time. It also downloads your eBay orders and imports them to your Shopify store. This integration provides a number of features and benefits that can help you optimize your eBay sales and grow your business.
One of the main features of the integration is inventory syncing. This allows you to automatically update your inventory levels on eBay as they change on your Shopify store. This means that you will never over-sell an item, as your eBay listings will automatically be updated to reflect your current inventory levels.
Another key feature of the integration is listing management. This allows you to create and update your eBay listings directly from your Shopify store. This means that you don’t have to manually update your listings on multiple platforms, which can save you a lot of time and effort. You can also use this feature to set up and manage your pricing, shipping, and other listing details across all your eBay listings.
The integration also provides sales synchronization features, where all ebay order is imported into the Shopify store. So sellers could have a single dashboard with all orders across all sales channels – it’s an online store. This helps to make data-driven decisions based not only on online stores but also on eBay sales.
Installation of Salestio eBay Integration is possible from Shopify App Store or start a trial from a Salestio website
Setting up Salestio’s Ebay Integration for Shopify
Very good overview of the installation of Salestio and migrating listings under the control of Salestio you can find in our video, which is described n detail in other our blog post – Connect Ebay to Shopify with Salestio
A few important steps are shown in this video:
- Installation of Salestio from the Shopify app store
- Adding your Ebay Account in the onboarding process
- Migrating existing lists under Salestio integration
This process is working perfectly fine if your listings are created with tool-supported ebay Trading API. In case your listing is from the old ebay app with a revised listing you could receive “Inventory-based listing management is not currently supported by this tool.”.
Let’s show how this could be solved.
Using Ebay Inventory API Listings with Salestio
After you installed Salestio, download ebay listings into Inventory, and you can start moving listings under the control of Salestio.
To correctly synchronize QTY and prices, Salestio required that your listings be located under the Selling Lists section. This type of listing we name “Managed by Salestio”, while all ebay listings are located under the Ebay Inventory page.
Salestio tries to match listings on ebay with products on Shopify. For matching Salestio using SKU codes and Titles. If there is no direct match it’s possible to manually set a corresponding product.
Please notice that is important that the structure of the product was the same on Shopify and ebay. If this is a variation product it should have the same number of options and option names should also be exactly the same.
Please click on the “Set Product” button and choose one of the available products from your Shopify store that should match ebay listings.
After this please click on “Move to Selling List”. This will migrate listings under the control of Salestio to automatically synchronize QTY & Prices based on changes in your shop.
If you don’t have a Selling List yet, please start first by creating a new one. We personally suggest you create a Selling List with “Product Mode”. Detailed information about creating Selling List, you can create on the Salestio documentation page – Overview of Ebay Selling List
After the ebay item is moved to the “Selling List” (you also could move multiple items), please open this Selling List for management, and then try to trigger a QTY revision for this item.
Such operation allows confirming that the actual connection is happening and the listing could be successfully updated from Salestio.
After triggering a QTY update, please wait a few minutes and check the result of the operation. In some cases, you may receive the error “Update Error”. This means that the operation of the update for the ebay listing finished with an error. To understand better what happens, please click on “Logs” and check what you see here.
Please check below a few most common errors that could happen:
Inventory-based listing management is not currently supported by this tool. Please refer to the tool used to create this listing.
This means that the listing is created using Ebay Inventory API, but Selling List is not configured to use it with such mode.
To solve this issue, please open the connected “Ebay Profile” for editing, and activate the option “Use Inventory API”
Then please return back to Selling List and re-trigger the “Update QTY” operation.
Please re-connect your ebay account to Salestio for using Inventory API calls
This error could happen, when Salestio is try to update the listing with Ebay Inventory API, with account credentials created with old auth flow.
The solution to this issue will be to re-connect the ebay account inside Salestio Application.
- Please navigate to page Salestio > Ebay > Accounts
- Click on the Edit button close to your Account
- Click on the “Connect to Ebay Account button” at the edit form
After you return from the ebay authorization flow back to the application, please trigger one more time the “QTY Revise” operation.
As soon as the operation of Revise QTY finished with “Sucess”, it’s confirmed that the existing ebay listing is successfully linked to the Shopify product and further changes to stock or price in Shopify will reflect changes on ebay listings as well. And this also works for listings created with Ebay Inventory API (e.g. using the old Shopify ebay App).
Summary
The discontinuation of Shopify’s free eBay app has created a need for an efficient and reliable solution to manage inventory and listings on eBay. Salestio’s Ebay Integration for Shopify fills this need by providing an innovative tool that allows merchants to connect their Shopify store to their eBay account. This integration enables not only allow standard functions like inventory syncing, listing management, and order importing, making the process of running an e-commerce business more efficient and profitable. But it also allows easy migrate existing ebay listings without needing to stop and relist items (losing item sales history). Is the listing created with Trading API or using Inventory API, does not matter. Salestio could manage both types of products.
You can install Salestio’s Ebay Integration for the Shopify stores, directly from Shopify App Store, or start a free trial from the Salestio website.
For educational videos related to e-commerce, please subscribe to our youtube channel – and follow our news on Twitter or Facebook
