Integrating Magento with Amazon Seller Central

Amazon Seller Central is a hugely effective marketplace for selling products and we have developed a completely automated and scheduled integration between the two platforms.

Using the Discount Emporium (opens in a new tab) as an example you will see that the entire product catalogue is replicated in Amazon on both the Discount Emporium Amazon web store and its general Amazon listings. Take a look at the Discount Emporium storefront on Amazon to see what we mean (opens in a new tab).

Now if only it were that simple. The problem with the off the shelf solutions that some developers have created is that they only replicate the product listings. What we found is that when you want to sell on Amazon, particularly if you are in the cut throat electrical appliance market, you need to be able to account for the lavish fees that Amazon take.

You also need to consider how to deal with stock issues. Even with live ERP integrations, stock on the web site is often up to 24 hours behind actual stock in the warehouse, so you need to be able to create stock buffers in the listings going up to Amazon.

Our solution was to develop an integration that never lists an item where web stock is below a certain number. You can dictate this to suit your requirements. Our learning was that if you go out of stock but take an order on Amazon Seller Central it will crucify you for it.

In addition we developed the mark up system as well, allowing you to factor in your Amazon mark up and then add VAT so that you know you won't be losing money.

Once developed we did rigorous testing between Magento and the Amazon Seller Central API so that we could run a CRON script at pre-determined times, again you can set these, so that inventory was updated with OOS items being removed and new items being added in automatically.

Orders received on the Amazon Seller Central platform are then auto imported into the Discount Emporium back end system (Dynamics NAV) every morning so that they get auto-dispatched. We can also pass them through as actual Magento orders for less automated clients.

In fact on Discount Emporium we have a feed from the warehouse ERP which is in Microsoft Dynamics NAV, and then the automated feed from Magento into Amazon Seller Central, and soon e-Bay, so that as a business everything can be controlled from NAV.

The reason we developed it this way was so that we could integrate other customer sites with Amazon Seller Central where Magento is the main platform for the business. All in all its a successful integration and sales are healthy through Amazon with maximum automation and minimum fuss.

So if you are interested in leveraging Magento to integrate with Amazon Seller Central or eBay it will save you a lot of time if you speak with us as part of the process. We've been there and done it. And the proof is there for all to see!