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Amazon Juggernaut


Dan Cole

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@ArtcoInc @greasemonkey @Dan Cole Alright. Let me take a look at what I got and think of a way to share this in a meaningful way. It's built with a couple of php classes and sitting on top of a heavily customized version of OsC. This will not be a drop in solution, so some motivation and technical work on the receivers end will be required, I think. 

I can't promise anything this week, but I'll start looking into sharing code and guidelines to make this work for you. Expect two functionalities: 1) Synching your OsC inventory with Amazon, QTPro supported and 2) Downloading Amazon orders to OsC with inventory update.

In the mean time, get your credentials in order: 

https://developer.amazonservices.com

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  • 2 weeks later...

Hey everyone, ok.... 1 month down.

Sales a little over $3000 - which is "ok"... not a game changer by any means... but we are a brand new seller and I only have a 15% of our inventory up.

I have rationalized the fee's (15%) this way: 1) currently we offer a wholesale price to a commercial customers (between 5 and 20%)... but not on Amazon 2) covered in the fee's are credit card processing (approx 2.5% depending on the card or paypal).

Only 1 sale on Amazon was to a customer who had registered on our site (and they had an account - but never purchasing).

Listing is a pain in the butt - many items have previously been listed by other sellers incorrectly.

Long story short - this test, so far, has proven Amazon has access to a HUGE group of customers that do NOT shop on my site.

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@greasemonkey @sapguy Very interesting Scott....I'm waiting to see what Petter comes up with for integrating osC with Amazon....if it is not too time consuming I'll be testing this too.  Seems I need to set up a merchant account before I can get the developers credentials he pointed us to.  That involves a monthly fee so I thought I'd take a wait and see approach before taking the plunge.

Dan

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11 hours ago, sapguy said:

 

Have you considered going for seller fulfilled prime? 

Not yet.... because we are a new seller it is not an option. We only have 5 reviews so far (all positive.... but that is only a few).

I also wonder if Amazon even offer it for .ca (I haven't seen it as an option).

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I realized that our own system from 2008 is customized to such a degree that it is impossible for me to share our own Amazon MWS implementation. Instead, I created a simple example from scratch using the core OsC products table where I synch a product's quantity from OsCommerce to Amazon via an API call. It is a start. This example uses a product without attributes for simplicity. You will need to manually create a database table and copy/paste PHP code to run through this tutorial. And you need to be a seller on Amazon and to be registered as a developer to go through these steps. 

Please, while following this tutorial, only list ASINs for sale on Amazon that you are actually selling, please do not blindly list the product listed in this tutorial unless you have it in stock and you are ready to ship it. Amazon does not have a sandbox environment, the system you are interfacing with is live. 

If the audience here finds this useful I'll go ahead and create a similar tutorial for downloading orders from Amazon to OsCommerce. 

With that said, Amazon offers its own PHP library that you can download and learn how to use. 

OsCommerce-Inventory-Synchronization-with Amazon-via-MWS-API.docx

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  • 3 weeks later...

Some advice for those who have gone to the "dark side"....focus on turning those new buyers into repeat customers.

Independent retailers, repeat buyers, and Amazon

Dan

 

 

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When I first started with my oline idea, I sold on Ebay first to guage interests, then created the store.  Back then you could put your web address in your Ebay ads, which helped get some traffic.  I was also one of the earlier online shops for my category and now it's a lot more croweded.  Amazon tried to get me to sell there many years ago, but I didn't think it would work.  Some of my competitors do it but I'm not sure how much success they have.  My product line is a niche market and some items are obscure.

Since @Dan Cole is in the aquarium business, I'll also say that I sold live coral on Ebay 2003-2004 when there was hardly anyone trying that.  I was able to sell packs or 4 on Ebay and then tell them buyer that I have room in the box to add 2 more and increase the sale.  At this time my dried flower biz wasn't producing a lot of sales and I paid my mortgage selling coral online.

I'm not really a dog.

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