Would be good to have a link which uploaded stock onto Amazon. I’d need to understand more fully how linking with eBay would work logistically. I’m interested in both - as for resources, my partner is a PHP developer.

We have started on an eBay module for our purposes but it pretty much covers all the major features.

The goals are:

Optionally mirror the category structure to an eBay store if you have one.
Ability to post auctions based on products (BIN and traditional).
Integrated orders.

The products themselves are used with a template to create the auction (ie; images, features/specifications and what not) but the product price is ignored and you may specify them as per usual when creating an eBay auction.

Orders integrated with magento so when an item is won/bought on eBay, an order is created in magento with the paid price, etc.  This allows us to easily ship items and manage stock quantities as per usual.

Basically we want to use eBay as a marketing tool and rarely have to visit it, as all management functions can be done from within the magento admin panel.

I have been using eBay’s ProStores storefront for a while (needed the eBay integration of the web store). Their take on how they do this seems to work well.

When browsing through your item catalog on the admin side, you can click a “list on eBay” button that will bring up an eBay listing tool, which gathers additional information such as what eBay category to list that item in, what auction format you want, the title of the auction, description, starting prices, all the eBay-related options, etc.

Everything that can be pre-filled out already is. It maps the short 1-line item name from the store catalog to the auction title, the long item description to the auction body, the item’s price to the auction start price, etc. Everything is changeable of course.

The one thing that is very important is that with this eBay listing tool, you can select a user-made template that will pre-fill certain options - such as your return policy, the auction format, shipping markups, and a template-driven layout for your eBay auction body that would have things in there appropriate for eBay such as “This item sold AS-IS, PayPal accepted, We are a member of SquareTrade, etc”. The template for the auction body used a custom store-tag language allowing you to pulled in information from the web store such as the web stores item description, photos, etc. This made the auction body very customizable and independent from whatever format you used in the store.

In the end, once you created your eBay t

(oops) it cut that last comment…

In the end, once you created your eBay template (pretend we have an AS-IS one), all you would have to do is click “list on eBay”, select the AS-IS template, select your eBay category for that item, double check the auction format/prices/other options, then click “list it!”. The entire item is listed on eBay using your AS-IS template look-and-feel, with all the eBay AS-IS specific verbiage, headers/footers/graphics, with the auction body formatted like the rest of your other eBay auctions (text and photos).

Once the auction is won, the buyer is redirected back to the store to complete checkout, keeping everything in one place (as well as allowing up-selling/cross-selling items). Items were automatically removed form store inventory when on eBay and put back if the auction had no winners…

Phew, that was long winded...hope that helps!

I currently use Marketworks to manage all of my eBay sales, I would be pleased to offer any information including inventory export files containing all fileds used to list items on eBay etc. This would give a great starting point, it would then be a matter of figuring out all of the API calls.

Let me know if I can help!

I like the idea of the as-is templates and because everything in Magento is attribute based it makes it very easy to create a simple template based system basically using attribute codes as template codes, something like {{price}} or {{short_description}}

I am waiting for the New magento 1.1 with the API before i try any thing with ebay integration.
But yhea you can use marketworks or any such service and exports you products from the import export option.