eMarketplace autoloaders

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As a newbie to the whibbly whobbly world of online, I have the lovely task of 'sorting out our eMarketplace presence' I've started with Amazon UK and I'm shocked about how rubbish the customer journey is for a seller.

We have a proseller account and also an eBay shop and even uploading the small number of 60 SKUs seems like a massive task, then I have Amazon US to sort then other countries then other eMarketplaces.

Surely there has to be an easier, more efficient way to do this?

I thought Channel Advisor was my saviour but they replicate a big part of what BrightPearl does and we have only just gone live with that, so I can't exactly rip that out.

HELP! Do any of you ecommerce experts have any pointers for me PLEASE!!!

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Thanks for the response, and yes I am struggling with uploading things onto Amazon in an efficient way.

I'm new to this, so no doubt making some mistakes, however in the last week I have discovered that you need to learn HTML to stop your product descriptions being truncated (really?, surely something as established as Amazon should have a basic editor)

Even if you size the images as per Amazon guidelines, they often 'hang' as you're trying to upload them. The thumbnail sometimes uploads, but then 5 mins later it says "sorry could not upload your photo".

When you publish a listing, it says that it's been successful but then it never appears in the marketplace (this happened to me 5 times yesterday, I nearly threw the PC out the window)

Apparently it's against Amazon policy (according to the sometimes contradictory advice in the Seller centre) to upload videos, but I see people do it, although I can't work out how to do it myself. You'd a thought video would be value add to selling products, yet Amazon is not clear on this point and certainly doesn't make it simple.

Blah blah blah

Anyway, I've spent a week to get 5 SKUs online in a format that I'd be happy for our customers to view, which is not a constructive use of my time.

I need to get 50 online (low number I know compared to others) then do the same for Amazon US and Europe, then eBay and other eMarketplaces.

Ultimately I'm looking for a system that automates this and I can manage our products in one place, hence the question.

I had a chat with the sales guys at Channel Advisor late yesterday and it seems that they can help with the above (although it ain't cheap) and it will integrate with Brightpearl which manages all of our stock control & fulfilment.

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jas xjr said:

Something I used to do to speed up the process was to use a barcode scanner to enter the code.
We had 20-25 pages of products

Thanks, but excuse me being thick, how does that work? So you use the EAN to link the rest of the data and then that auto populates Amazon?

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Thanks for the advice, I appreciate it, especially the cost one. We have too have a premium product and all of our products are own branded but we do have competitors with similar products who could undercut.

On the variation one, interesting, we have 1 product with 20 variations, I was planning to do 20 different listings to get more exposure / better SEO.

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DSLiverpool said:

Easiest way is look in the search terms when creating a listing you will see two sets of fields, one for normal search terms and another set for long tail search terms that may be greyed out - if you can enter text in here you have been upgraded

Wow, we are a platinum seller then! God knows how, I actually left that box blank as I thought it wasn't for us.

jas xjr said:

I should have made it clear,we used to sell toys,so these products,mostly had been sold before.so by entering the ean, via the scanner,if the product had been
listed before,it would bring up the description and photo.you could then add quantity and price plus condition.
I think you might be looking at some sort of CSV file,which is not something I am familiar with

That makes sense, thanks. We actually manufacture our own products (well, we're the legal manufacturer but outsource the actually doing) so have to issue our own barcodes.