Can you import items from Ebay to another shopping cart?

[elynn78]

Hi,

I am a graphic designer with a fair amount of basic website development experience - but I am totally new to the ecommerce end of things.

Currently, I am trying to help out a friend who would like to set up a website to sell from. He has been selling on ebay for several years, and has over a thousand items created there. He would like to know if its possible, on any shopping cart, to import this information so that it doesn't need to be re-entered a second time. Most likely, he would be interested in a shopping cart service that is the all-inclusive, user friendly variety - and not so much a free DIY type.

On a side note (although I noticed a separate thread about this exact question already, which is still unanswered). He also has a bricks and mortar store and he would like to be able to take orders through the site, but then process credit card transactions manually at his store. Is that a possibility?

Thanks a ton!

Emily

[tyroneshum]

Hi Emily,

Great question! I am not sure if I can answer this question completely, but I'll do my best. If your friend has thousands of products, I would assume he would use TurboLister to upload these products. Within Turbolister there should be an export data function allowing him to extract the products into an excel csv or txt file.

Once you can get all the information out from TurboLister, then edit the data into a format ready to be imported into an e-commerce software.

In answer to this question: "Most likely, he would be interested in a shopping cart service that is the all-inclusive, user friendly variety - and not so much a free DIY type."

I would highly recommend Magento Commerce. It's an open source and very friendly and easy to use software. It is the way of the future and you won't have a problem importing the data into this store, as there are import modules that allow for this. I wrote a review about this if you want some more information as well:
http://www.internetbusinesspath.com/...ommerce-review

Lastly in response to the bricks and mortar business: yes you can take orders through the site and then process the credit cards manually. It has an option to do that, and that's what I currently do as well.

Let me know how you go?

Thanks.

[JEccles]

Emily, have your friend look into Volusion. I've been dealing with them for over 3 years and am quite happy with the functionality and flexibility of their stores.

[schoolboy]

Yes... you can export ebay store data using turbolister to a csv file. This will enable you to work with the data in a spreadsheet. Just how you then import it into another cart will depend on that cart's data import format.

As far as Magento is concerned, I draw your attention to this post:

http://forums.smallbusinesscomputing...35&postcount=6

... and I would also caution you about using Magento. We've been testing it for several months and in our opinion, it has some way to go before we'd look at putting a live store on it. It LOOKS very nice on-screen, but its inner workings are very poor, limited and clunky.

[Buddha]

for this particular poster, and ANYBODY who does not have programming knowledge, stay far away from Magento.....it is very complicated and has a big learning curve even for programmers.....it looks really nice, but you'll have no chance of getting it to look the way you WANT it to without extensive knowledge........this poster said his friend was looking for an all-inclusive and not a DIY, which magento is completely a do it yourself......

i spent a week looking at open-source wanting to have a free solution, thinking i could learn enough coding to make it work, and i realized it would take me a long time to get to where i needed to be........once i stumbled across a few hosted solutions i was amazed by what you can do with drag & drop, and clicks of the mouse......personally that's what i'm looking for

if you're still looking at this thread, you might want to take a look at Prostores from Ebay - I haven't fully evaluated them but it's only $20/mo for powesellers and fully integrates w/Ebay - it's also a hosted (ie., easy point and click, no programming knowledge required) solution

[Fakingit]

Definately the easiest way to go is with Prostores, as Prostores is owned by Ebay and part of their big manifestion of greed along with buying paypal and making everybody on ebay use it. This is fully integrated with Ebay but has a lot of limitations in other respects as a shopping cart solution. That is probably it's best feature.

However, this is a feature that now is showing up in other shopping carts as well, as many people make this move after establishing large inventory listings on ebay. One company now doing this is Shopit. I don't know much about Shopit but they are definately marketing a slick import from ebay to Shopit. I think Shopit is rated as a better overall cart than procart but procart was designed specifically to get ebay sellers into a shopping cart, so it will definately be the easiest migration

[Datsundude]

I have a similar question and wonder if anyone has ever moved data and pictures from one ebay store into another ebay store?

Thank you in advance.

M

[Fakingit]

When it comes to Ebay, some ecommerce platforms have developed some applications to sell on Ebay from the main store (i.e. Big Commerce). In this case, you can send items to any ebay store you own from your ecommerce site. But to go back and forth you have to go with Pro Stores. Applications for Ebay are limited because Ebay owns Prostores and so they have developed inhouse these apps. So if you own a pro store, you can both send store inventory and images to an ebay account, or pull items from an ebay account to your pro store. Therefore, you could send items from your pro store to as many ebay accounts as you wanted to or vice versa.