Top 3 Marketplaces Your eCommerce B2B Software Has to Integrate With

Marketplaces have entirely changed the face of eCommerce. Almost all people start their product searches and make purchases on marketplaces. For retailers marketplaces are a great additional sales channel to present their products to millions of customers.

But selling on multiple platforms, including marketplaces present some challenges. Processing orders from different sources, updating listings, managing stock levels, etc is hard. Thus, they are looking for software solutions that would take over all complicated tasks.

That is why eCommerce software providers should be able to work smoothly not only with web stores, but with marketplaces too because retailers need their orders, data, and various business processes from different channels consolidated in one system. What is necessary for eCommerce software vendors who want to become really functional and irreplaceable for sellers, is integrations with various shopping carts and marketplaces.

In this article we have collected the list of the top global retail marketplaces each self-respecting software vendor should integrate with.

Amazon

This marketplace is among the first eCommerce software vendors should integrate with. Amazon was started in 1994 and gained over the years the reputation of a trusted brand and a powerful platform. It has one of the highest satisfactory ratings and dedicated audience accessing this marketplace each day. Moreover, over 50% of all commerce related searches start on Amazon.

Speaking about the facts and numbers, Amazon counts 350+ million active members and sells more than 120 million different products. It is not surprising why it attracts a lot of customers as its variety of items is huge, from every day to hard to find items. Therefore, with Amazon, it’s easy to reach a large database at scale.

eBay

The second leading marketplace is undoubtedly Ebay. Founded in 1995, it is now one of the most recognized brands around the world. What makes it especially popular is the ease of use and cost-effectiveness.>

On eBay, there are 170 million potential customers all around the world. Though this marketplace is the second to Amazon due to the number of clients, it has a high customer satisfaction rating: 81% of 2017. Similar to Amazon, eBay gives the ability for retailers to sell practically anything. It works the best for vintage items and handmade items.

Etsy

Etsy is 25 times smaller than eBay, though a very promising and perspective. The marketplace has been founded over 20 years and still attracts millions of customers with its unique handmade, factory-made, vintage, and handmade items.

The platform covers large, targeted audience of 54 million members and 24 million active buyers according to Statista. They tend to find unique items and gifts that aren’t sold elsewhere. So, integrating with Etsy you will work with a database of creative audience and their products.

Pitfalls When Developing Separate Integration with Marketplaces

If you choose to develop in-house integration with marketplaces, then you should be aware of the challenges that you may encounter. Here are some of them:

• The integration process is quite time-consuming and requires a high-qualified specialist who will spend at least 2 weeks on its development. As to Amazon API, it is old and requires your developer to have certain skills and knowledge. Working with products, shipments, etc. is possible only with the help of a CSV file or XML. What's more, Amazon API docs do not contain actual examples that also worsen the situation.
• Considering eBay marketplace, it is also quite difficult to work with its API. Various data (like products, customers, orders. etc.) have different formats. Somewhere it can be XML, somewhere - JSON. Moreover, eBay Sandbox doesn’t work correctly and has a significant number of bugs. It requires a lot of time to check the performed requests as eBay produces uninformative errors. For example, you can get the errors with such kinds of explanations: “A user error has occurred. Sorry, something went wrong. Please wait a moment and try again.”, “There was a problem with an eBay internal system or process. Contact developer support for assistance”.
• Sometimes eBay API Docs do not contain necessary information and developers will have to search the answers to their questions in the eBay Developer Forums. Usually, it requires a lot of time.
• Developing integration with Etsy on your own is undoubtedly a tedious task. This marketplace has its own architecture and logic. Integration with this marketplace is also very costly and requires the skills of expert developers. Moreover, after the integration is finished, it continues to need maintenance, upgrades, and fixes.
• The other difficulty is that there is no connection between product variants and images. In addition to this, testing Etsy API is a really expensive process.

Marketplace Integration with API2Cart

Integration with marketplaces enables you to access and manage the data like customers, orders, products, categories and etc. The fact is also that the more marketplaces you integrate with, the more potential customers you may have.