Howdy,
Let us start by saying “thank you“.
Over 500 people joined us for the live webinar and everything went off without a hitch. Phew!
In this article we’re going to cover with you what was included in the Webinar, plus at the bottom of this page we have answered ALL of the questions asked in the webinar and the extra ones that came in directly as well prior to & after the webinar via email & twitter.
Starting from nothing to getting to this stage of listing onto eBay & processing an order in just 60 minutes.
This was always going to be quite a tall challenge and personally I’m so impressed that we were able to do that with you live and also share with you why & how as we went along.
The product we created in Magento live with you went to eBay immediately, we saw the revisions to the product description being made live and the order we made on eBay came into Magento, then when we updated the order and eBay was updated immediately.
If you do have a question you can reach us both in the comments box at the bottom.
Again thank you for joining us and let’s take a look at was covered and answer those 201 questions you asked :)
The Webinar Recording
At the top of this page is the recording of the webinar.
We wanted to show you as much as we could do in 60 minutes and had to skimp quite a few areas to be able to do this. I want to reassure you, that everything we skimmed over with you is covered in the video courses we have on this website.
Note: If you want to just get into the main part of the webinar, use this link to skip straight to it.
We took you through the entire process step by step at a much slower pace, so you can understand the why and the how to setting up your own Magento system to sell onto eBay.
That said, the agenda for the webinar is below and we covered oodles more with you:
Installing Magento
A tour around Magento
Creating our first product
Adding in the free M2EPro Extension
Following the M2EPro setup wizard through
Listing on to eBay
Buying the item live & processing the order
Summary
The Cost of Magento & M2EPro
Live Question & Answers session
Installing Magento
For non-nerds installing Magento sounds scary, but the reality is that it’s quite the opposite.
We saw that using Installatron to install Magento was dead easy, something like 4 or 5 clicks and you’re ready to roll.
Installatron can do much more than just install Magento, you can use it to make ad-hoc and scheduled onsite and off site backups of Magento, clone your Magento website to test extensions with and several other cool things.
Our point here is that it’s point and click.
Installing Magento doesn’t need a degree in nerd and we showed how to do this live and of course we’ll show you much more slowly and in more detail in this video training course.
A tour around Magento
We then had a tour around Magento, this is the tour that I wish I had when I first started using Magento.
There are a couple of key places you need to know about in Magento these are:
The Magento Dashboard
This is where you can see an over to your business in Magento.
As we didn’t have any products or sales in our Magento website this did look kinda boring, however this will become much more exciting over time.
Over to the right I’ve including a screenshot of what the Magento dashboard looks like today (click the image for a large version).
The two orders that were pulled down from eBay in there. Not riveting yet, but you can see where it’s heading.
Manage Products
From the top menu if you select Catalog > Manage Products this is where all your products are stored.
At the very beginning, this page is empty, however we showed you how to create your first product in Magento and we saw how all the search and filtering options could be very useful.
Prior to creating our first product in Magento, we did make some tweaks to Magento so that it was more like a multichannel system that you may be used to. We had added in several new fields just for the marketplaces and populated them live with you.
We also saw that you can upload as many images as you need into Magento (which are also used on eBay!), that you can categorise products and also Magento comes with stock control too.
Over to the right I’ve included a screenshot of what the product that we created in Magento (click it for large version).
Manage Orders
From the top menu if you select Sales > Orders this is where all your orders are stored.
Near the end of the webinar, we saw the order that Dave made live on eBay come into Magento.
This was a REAL order from eBay, just like what orders from your customers on eBay would do.
I’ve included a screenshot of the order that came into Magento over to the right, again click it for the large version.
We can see that we have the customer details, the item that was ordered, the eBay information and also the PayPal information is also displayed
Configuration
And finally the configuration section in Magento, this is in System > Configuration.
We didn’t see what the settings do in this section, however as we explained in the webinar, Magento supports multiple websites, multiple eBay accounts and of course multiple currencies too.
In the interests of time, we did pre-edit a Magento installation with all the settings for the United Kingdom as that’s where we’re based and were going to be listing to eBay from.
Magento by default is installed with settings for the United States and we do show you how to customise Magento for your country in the video tutorials.
Creating our first product
For the webinar we created a really exciting product in Magento, a toaster.
The thing to note is that it doesn’t matter if you are selling toasters, TV’s that don’t have any variations or products that do have variations dresses or footwear, Magento has a comprehensive inventory management system that allows you to create all of these products.
As mentioned above, we have tweaked Magento a little bit especially for the marketplaces and also for speed of editing and creation.
There are a lot of fields that come with Magento that you won’t ever use, so we strip these out and put them elsewhere on the product page so it’s as slick as it can be for you and your business needs.
The images that you add in Magento are used on eBay too, so rather than showing you another screenshot of a product in Magento, I’ve included a screenshot of the product images that were used in Magento, in the live eBay listing we created with you.
Adding in the free M2EPro Extension
M2EPro is just one of thousands of extensions available for Magento.
However this extension is special for a number of reasons:
Has been actively developed by Magento professionals since 2009 (that’s almost 5 years!)
Is the only eBay endorsed extension for Magento
M2EPro and eBay have a partnership agreement in place and M2EPro is provided free of charge for eBay businesses
Both eBay & M2EPro teams work closely together
All the Major eBay sites are supported
I’m not going to cover the features that the M2EPro supports here as it’s an epic list, also as many of these are covered in the answers to the questions that were asked live on the webinar, which we’ve answered below (all 201 of them).
Basically the features that M2EPro has when combined with the open source flexibility Magento is unparalleled.
Following the M2EPro setup wizard through
M2EPro has a really easy to follow setup wizard that will take you through the steps of setting up the extension for you to be able to create listings, manage products and process eBay orders in Magento.
We linked our eBay account securely and chose the advanced M2EPro wizard. This showed you how to can create policies in M2E Pro to manage your eBay listings.
If you’ve not come across the term “policies” before, don’t panic, these are templates or think of them as being cookie cutters to make yummy cookies. You can create as many different versions as you need and reuse them over & over again.
This makes listing new products or updating existing listings on eBay much more manageable.
Also note that this is a feature that you find in the more advanced ( and expensive *coff* ) 2nd generation multichannel software tools and is included in M2E Pro as standard.
Listing on to eBay
Once we went through the setup wizard we were ready to list our first product on eBay.
Listing products on to eBay from Magento is really simple to do.
In the screenshot to the right we can see the eBay category being selected, we also set up the eBay store category we wanted to use and also also eBay item specifics.
Once we had entered the information needed, which was super fast compared to using say the eBay Sell Your Item form because we had already made the policies previously ( those cookie cutter templates ) the listing was then live on eBay.
You also saw that M2E Pro comes with a comprehensive keywords list and during the webinar, Matt used the eBay listing template that is available for UnderstandingE members to create a fantastic looking eBay listing with zero coding.
Note: I got really excited that the listing actually went onto eBay during the webinar, the reason for this was not in surprise that M2E Pro actually works (we know that it works, it’s used by thousands of businesses), rather that all the settings that we had put in together live with you were the right ones as we were going really quickly to show you.
Buying the item live & processing the order
We then bought the toaster we had listed together live on eBay ( well Dave did, he’s our #1 customer in the video tutorials! )
Normally the order would have taken a few minutes to appear, as with any multi-channel software for eBay, however with a little nudge to speed things along the order came straight into Magento.
The thing to note here is that this was just one order, over the course of the day you will have all your eBay orders being collected in Magento ( along with your website orders too ) and you can process your orders in bulk and courier integrations to Royal Mail, DPD, Interlink, Parcel Force are all available in Magento.
We marked the order as being shipped and eBay was updated immediately.
So your buyers will see the tracking information that you enter in Magento, on their eBay orders.
Summary
We crammed as much as we could into the 60 minutes webinar for you, to show you that Magento isn’t scary and that M2EPro really does work.
The reality is that we had to skim a number of key sections and information to do this in just one hour, so don’t think for a second that you need follow us along using the video recording, we have over 70 video tutorials to guide you through step by step.
You can learn the how and the why as you follow them along and you can get started today here: Understandinge.com/magento-tutorials/
We asked for help during the webinar for the those who were listening who sell on eBay to let those who hadn’t started yet to share roughly how many orders each month they get on eBay, here are just some the numbers entered by real business owners just like you:
400-600, 100, 1400, 93, 150, 100, 200, 1500, 100, +400, 200, 200-300, 200, 450, 100, 60, +500, 400, 200, 200-300, 250, 60, 500, 200, 120, 2000, +400, +1000, 100, 200, 1500, 3200, 150, 4000, 1200, 8000, 700-800 and there were loads more as well.
You get the gist, lots of orders are made on eBay.
We saw that installing Magento only took a few moments and navigating around Magento is easy. Creating and managing products in Magento is straight forwards and adding in the M2E Pro extension was painless.
Once we had installed the M2E Pro extension, we went through the setup wizard, added our our example product, the toaster, adding in a custom eBay listing template, set our eBay category & eBay item specifics and listed the item live to eBay.
We purchased the product live on eBay and we saw the order come in to our Magento system, we then marked the order as being shipped with custom tracking information and eBay was updated immediately.
This was just one product, one eBay listing and one order, to give you a taster of what is possible.
The reality is that Magento and M2EPro can handle thousands of products, variation listings, multiple eBay accounts, multiple eBay sites and oodles of orders.
The Cost of Magento & M2EPro
Before we take a look at how much this could cost you there is one extremely important factor to account for which is:
Magento & M2EPro are highly flexible, you add what you need and nothing that you don’t.
For example if you want a courier integration you buy it “off the shelf” and you’re not paying for 60% or more of a system that someone else uses and you’re never going to use.
The single requirement is that you have quality Magento webhosting, everything else is optional.
We’ve already vetted hosting providers for you and if you’re in the UK or Europe, then go with SimpleServers ( we use them ourselves, this site is hosted with them ) or if you’re in the USA then choose SimpleHelix. These start from £16 or $19.99 USD per month respectively.
One Year
We know how much other software companies charge for similar software and we suggest that you do your research to work out the numbers for yourself to see the huge disparity between the providers (the nearest comparable tool is £960 + VAT p/a with no Magento website, after that the sky-is-the-limit on what multichannel software can cost).
I also know that after working with hundreds of businesses using eBay, there is no such thing as a typical business, so these numbers are going to wrong for you and your business, but will give you a very good idea on the money you could save:
Cost
Notes
Magento Web Hosting
£176
Required. £16×11. The first month is free
Order Management Extensions
£120
Optional. One time cost
Royal Mail DMO Extension
£149
Optional. One time cost
UE Premium Membership
£180
Optional
Responsive Magento website theme
£60
Optional, $99 and our next video course
Total for one year:
£685
Noting that the only requirement is decent Magento web-hosting. We suggest SimpleServers because they’re UK based. If you’re in the USA, then SimpleHelix is $19.99 a month.
And remember:
No sales person will call you
You pick & choose what you need “off the shelf”
M2EPro is the only eBay endorsed extension for Magento
M2EPro is subsidised for eBay businesses & support is provided free
Magento is Open Source
There is a community of 1,000 business owners just like you right here on UnderstandingE to help you out ( if needed )
And of course, over 70 full HD video tutorials right here to show the how and the why to setup your own multichannel software
Your Questions, Answered
As you can image with over 500 attendees during the webinar we received a lot of questions and we did our best to answer as many of them as we could live with you.
However because of the sheer velocity of questions, we couldn’t answer them all and many were missed ( the chat box was moving so fast at one point, it was blurring! ).
Taking advantage of the bank holiday weekend, I have personally answered ALL of your questions below.
All questions & comments are left exactly how they were asked, the only thing I have altered is the removal of specific software companies names and replace their names with “[removed]“.
If you have a question or questions which aren’t covered below, you can reach Matt & Dave in the forums here or leave a comment for us at the bottom of this page ( and remember our house rule, “There is no such thing as a daft question if you don’t know the answer” ).
Let’s do this!
#1 Stuart: “Can I use this listing method without affecting my listings that are already running?“
Hi Stuart, yes you can.
#2 Numerous people: “Hi, can we record this webinar?” & “will you be making webinair available later via a link or download ?”
Yes, see above :)
#3 James: “is that [M2EPro] available as a manual install?”
Hi James, I would personally suggest using the Magentoconnect Manager for the installation, under normal cicumstances it just works. However see this link which is what Alan suggested in the chat live in the webinar.
#4 Mike: “what if you have 2 ebay accounts?”
Howdy Mike, multiple eBay accounts are supported in M2EPro. You can even separate them out into different store views in Magento, for reporting, accounts, processing, invoice customisations etc…
#5 Elaine: “Hi, Just about to sign up with Volusion; how is Magento different ?”
Hi Elaine, I believe I answered this question live for you on the webinar for you. If I wasn’t clear on the reply, just ask myself or Dave in the forums here.
#6 Mark: “does magento work with amazon too?”
Hi Mark, yes it does. M2EPro have Amazon integrated quite well and there are other extensions that do this too for Magento.
#7 Reinhard: “I was underthe impression that this seminar is for professional Ebay sellers, I don’t need to be educated about how ebay works or how good i”
Hi Reinhard, as noted in the webinar, there were 3 types of people attending, one of the types just use Magento so we covered why you should sell on eBay. We also narrowed this down to a single slide and gave 145 million reasons why.
#8 Robert: “they will show everything”, [the other reply was unpublishable]“
Thanks Robert
#9 Jusinte: “i love simpleservers”
Howdy Jusinte, we do too and this website is hosted by them. We also suggest that you use them for Magento if you’re in the UK & the EU
#10 Steve: “what are your thoughts on Magento GO”
Howdy Steve, Magento comes in 3 flavours, Magento Go which is the hosted version by Magento, Magento Community Edition, downloadable and Open Source and Magento Enterprise. We suggest Magento Community Edition because unlike Go, there are more than just a dozen extensions available. You can host Magento Community Edition where ever you want to and have access to thousands of extensions.
#11 Alan: “What is Magneto?”
lol Alan! I do believe that’s when I said “there is no such thing as a daft question” as the house rule, you can find out what Magento is here.
#12 Justine: “im looking for new niches to make millions any ideas people :)”
Howdy Justine, I’m sure everyone here too is as well. Have you tried Terapeak to research eBay?
#13 Laura: “can you make this slide bigger please, can’t see it”
Hi Laura, thanks for letting us know about that, we went to full screen as soon as we saw your message and the recorded version above is all in full screen.
#14 Ekta: “Magento is ahead of all as it is very user friendly as compared to other ecomemrce platforms.”
Couldn’t agree more Ekta, that’s why it’s the most adopted system for the top 1 million eCommerce websites
#15 David: “Where do you locate C Panel?”
Hi David, cPanel is provided by all good web hosting providers. If you’re unsure if you have this with your web hosting, just ask your hosting provider.
#16 Ursula: “how much does it cost to use magento?”
Howdy Ursula, Magento Community Edition is available for free.
#17 Robert: “Ekta I did install magento. so far I dont find magento that user friendly. It might be I need to see today the workflow again”
Hi Robert, I was exactly like you when I first started, Magento does get much easier to use when get used to it, plus in the webinar we give you a mini-tour of Magento as well.
#18 Julie: “What is the advantages of use Magento to advertise on eBay?”
Howdy Julie, I’m going to keep the reply very “light” on this as this gets into the topic of why use multichannel software and I won’t be able to do it justice here. Basically by having one single inventory & order management system, it allows you to be come more effective when selling across one or more sales channels. This is what the largest (and smallest) businesses do on eBay to save themselves time, effort & money.
#19 Robert: “I think magento scares people because it is known to be difficult for ecommerce stores. powerful but difficult.”
Hi Robert, anything new is a bit scary to begin with. Our aim for the webinar was to show you that it’s not scary at all
#20 Dominique: “I have a website on Selling Antiques. It does nothing for me whatsoever. How can you do better?”
Hi Dominique, this could get into a long reply, however as noted for Julie above, the time & effort you put into creating your eBay listings could be saved by creating your website products at the same time and then when one sells on eBay, your website is updated. Our point in the Webinar on why you should sell on eBay, was because they have 145 million users, so you are more likely to sell on eBay than you are on your website.
#21 James: “complexity of setup scares people”
Hi James, I couldn’t agree more. While we started making the video tutorials on Magento & M2E Pro, Dave coined the term “You don’t need a degree in Nerd”, we can show you how to set this up step by step without the complexity.
#22 Raj: “anyone using reliable web hosting with server locations in UK , as most of them in US”
Howdy Raj, yes, we use and suggest SimpleServers
#23 Mike: “Been using Magento for 5 years now very easy to use and update”
Howdy Mike, we’re both glad to hear that.
#24 Reinhard: “I tried Magento a few months back on my own dedicated server: very slow. I switched back to OScommerce, totally free. The bset thing: Ebay d”
Hi Reinhard, yes it most likely was. Magento needs specialised web hosting for it to run as quickly as it should do. Sorry the rest of your question was chopped off.
#25 Julie: “Our website developer said Magento requires quite a bit of understanding. We went with Prestashop which was a bit cheaper but not good.”
Hi Julie, your web developer is absolutely correct, which is why we have the video tutorials on Magento so that’s not a painful learning curve to understand Magento, plus the forums are a click away if you have any questions.
#26 Karen: “How does Magento fair with SEO – obviously as long as the pages are optimised correctly to start with ! – Is it ‘Google’ friendly ?”
Hi Karen, I answered this question live for you, I made one mistake when listening to the recording, I meant to say “meta keyword tags” are now pretty much obsolete. Besides that Magento is highly customisable.
#27 Lauren: “I visited a Digital Marketing show recently and got the impression that Magento was a must for new websites yet our new SEO company hates it”
Hi Lauren, most eCommerce websites are a challenge as there is typically a lot of duplication across the site. I suspect that they may not have much experience with Magento, which is the cause of the dislike.
#28 Jeni: “Also selling on differnet country ebay and amazon sites?”
Howdy Jeni, Yes you can sell on multiple eBay & Amazon sites using Magento & M2E Pro. Near the end in the Q&A session we show the section that has the main 23 eBay sites shown, waiting for you to enable them.
#29 Steve: “if you already sell on eBay can you import these into magento?”
Howdy Steve, M2E Pro will import products that are sold into Magento and you can map existing products in Magento to eBay listings as well.
#30 Jeni: “does it update stock levels for you depending where the sales are made?”
Hi Jeni, yes. This is one of the benefits of using multi-channel software, say you have 10 in stock, one sells on eBay, your website is changed to 9. Then you sell one on your website and have 8 left, eBay is updated to 8 as well.
#31 Mark: “can you bilk upload from spreadsheet”
Hi Mark, oh yes! Magento comes with an import & export tool and the dataflow manager too. Personally I prefer Magmi which allows you to import tens, hundreds and thousands of products in one go into Magento quickly and easily. There is a video course on Magmi here.
#32 A: “Question: Can M2ePro plugin import existing ebay listing into magento database?”
Hola, Yes it does do this when a order is made on eBay automatically. We are working on a tool to do this for you as well.
#33 Robert: “My default product screen does not have the bullet points.”
Hi Robert, we have made several tweaks to the Magento default attribute set and the bullet points were just one of the changes.
There are several reasons for this and they are covered in the getting started with Magento video course.
#34 Wendy: “Where would we find that course about importing via spreadsheet”
Hi Wendy, that would be Magmi and you can find the course here.
#35 Johanne: “What if you have a template, how do you add the description to templates so it goes in the correct place?”
Howdy Johanne, M2E Pro has the ability to use customised and professionally created listing templates. You would add these in your description policy and add in any keywords as appropriate.
Rather than explain all the details here, we have a video course on this which you can find here made up of 4 video tutorials which will explain, why and how.
#36 Mark: “can i meet up with you in manchester? interested in your services to help. we are ex-[removed] customers and currently [removed]“
Hi Mark, we are 100% focused on UnderstandingE and are unavailable for one on one consulting. If you have any questions, the forums are a click away here.
#37 Robert: “where is the default attribute set? Is that in system config?”
Howdy Robert, attribute sets in Magento are stored in Catalog > Attributes > Manage Attribute Sets.
#38 Hershil: “is [removed] worth it?”
Hi Hershil, I removed the company name there and my personal view to that question is no, it’s anymore.
#39 Alex: “Have you got a URL for the Tax video”
Howdy Alex, I’m not sure which country you’re in so here is the link to the Managing Orders in Magento course, just select the one that is right for your country.
#40 Robert: “Default does nto show sku field either. sku not needed in ebay listing but can be used for inventory purposes and it is needed in amazon”
Hi Robert, a SKU is needed on eBay if you’re going to be using multi-channel software. See this video which includes a quick interview with an eBay seller called Alex, that found this out the hard way.
#41 Elaine: “Im lost, I have no idea what is going on”
Howdy Elaine, we were moving at quite a quick pace to cover what we needed to.
I’m genuinely sorry if we lost you. The video tutorials are at a much slower pace, plus you can rewind, pause and follow them through at your own pace.
#42 Simon: “does the import via s/sheet deal with the importing of multi-variations Dave?”
Hi Simon, yes it does. See this video course on how to use Magmi.
#43 Colin: “what size is each image?”
Hi Colin, the images used were much larger than the eBay requirements. eBay now require you to have an image that is a minimum of 500 pixels on it’s longest side and if your images are not that big, we have a video and PHP script you can use do resize them here.
#44 Julie: “I stock control included in the monthly fee of 16 per month?”
Howdy Julie, the £16 is for Magento web hosting, Magento has inventory control built in and M2E Pro syncs the stock levels with your sales channels.
#45 Jenni: “Can current listing be impported into Magento or do I need to start again?”
Howdy Jule, this question was covered above for Steve, yes you can import products from eBay unto Magento.
#46 Reinhard: “Does each picture have to have an individual file name?”
Hi Reinhar, brilliant question and the answer is yes. Magento needs to have different image names for each image. A tip here would be to name each image with the stock number at the beginning, this will stop you inadvertently overwriting images.
#47 David: “How many products can you have stored in Megento”
Howdy David, in theory as many as you want. I’ve personally worked with Magento websites that have over 200,000 products.
#48 Sharaon: “Is this similar to [removed] or can be used in conjuction ?”
Howdy Sharaon, yes it is. You can use this in conjunction, however many of the options are duplicated and Magento & M2E Pro would make an excellent (and cheaper) alternative.
#49 Raj: “Is pro different from M2E”
Howdy Raj, It’s the same extension.
#50 Doug: “are you going to cover costs?”
Hi Doug, we do indeed and that came at the end of the webinar.
#51 Ekta: “This product was created on Magento , how can we make it live on eBay?”
Hi Ekta, we showed you how to do this in the webinar, your question came in a few minutes before we got to the cool part.
#52 Steve: “which flavors of magento oes m2e work with?”
Howdy Steve, all flavours, Magento Go, Community, & enterprise
#53 Robert: “doesnt m2e pro also list to amazon?”
Hi Robert, M2EPro does support listing to Amazon. Right now the part that is missing is the listing of variations to Amazon. This is to be included in the update at the end of Q2 2014.
Even when I worked at eSellerPro, my personal suggestion has been and it remains this way to this day, is that it’s far quicker and easier to create and list to Amazon using the excel import sheets. But I do know that they are not for everyone.
#54 Harry: “REMEMBER WHEN THEY LAUNCHED, THEYVE COME A VERY LONG WY”
Hi Harry, M2E Pro have come a very long way in a short space of time. That’s why we’re suggesting this extension to you to use for your marketplace business.
#55 Karen: “Does M2E work with free version of Magento ?”
Hi Karen, that would be Magento Community Edition and yes it does. This was the version that we installed live with you in the webinar.
#56 Chris: “Am I right in thinking that the vid you are uploading will have full sound as mine has dropped?”
Hi Chris, I’m sorry to hear that the sound dropped out.
At the top of this page is the recording of the webinar. We also recorded it separately for you so that the sound quality is better than what you will have heard on the webinar.
#57 Lauren: “Can M2E be used on two seperate websites to import products into one Ebay account?”
Hi Lauren, yes it can do. If you create one product in Magento, Magento can support multiple websites so you can show the product on those sites, plus with M2E Pro you can expose it to eBay too.
#58 Ursula: “does magento allow improvement of photos”
Hi Ursula, I’m afraid Magento doesn’t. You’ll want to conduct all image editing outside of Magento as you would right now on eBay.
#59 Dave: “how do I know which magento I have?”
Hi Dave, this is dead easy to find out, log into the admin section of your website, scroll to the bottom and at in the middle will be the version that you are using.
#60 Jonathan: “Using Magento Go and the one vital extension I need isn’t available!”
Howdy Jonathan, this is exactly the reason why we don’t suggest using Magento Go. Great to get started with, but you’re missing out on all the cool extensions from Magento Connect.
#61 Ryszard: “Is Magento work with Linux istributions?”
Hi Ryszard, I answered this one live in the webinar, there are two possible answers to this question.
For web hosting, we strongly recommend that you use a *unix distribution for the web server and if you are using Linux for your operating system, all you need is a web browser, such as Firefox or Konqueror if you’re using KDE.
#62 James: “always backup”
*bows to james* This should be tattooed on your arm.
Always backup and here is a video on how to back up Magento the easy way in 3.5 clicks.
#63 Laura Mathieson far too technical for me too seems like a lot to learn
Hi Laura, I’m afraid there is quite a bit to learn. This is the same for any multichannel software I’m afraid.
On the bright side though, you’re learning with over 1000 others and you have access to myself Matt & Dave in the forums too. Plus see James’s comment below:
#64 James Macdonald “takes time but once using it, becomes second nature”
Hi James, thank you!
#65 Robert: “my install using quickinstall of magento and then m2e pro took a few hours using the tutorials on understanding e website”
Hi Robert, yep it will take a couple of hours to get to grips with everything. We’ve had people sitting in their jim-jams for the day while they’ve been through the tutorials.
#66 Sharon: “see you on U-e, can we send dumb questions? :)”
Howdy Sharon, there is no such thing as a dumb question if you don’t know the answer and I dare you to fill the forums with any that you have.
I ask dumb questions everyday, it’s why I’ve learnt so much and have sooooo much more to learn.
#67 M: “can we link more than 1 eBay account?”
Howdy M, yes you can. The wizard that we showed you only sets up one eBay account, but you can add more in in the configuration section.
#68 Laura: “so once installed would i list just using magento and not at all directly through ebay?”
Howdy Laura, yes that’s right. No need to use the sell your item form again. Plus you can use the policies we showed you to expediate the process massively.
#69 David: “Do you run couses on this? I mean a weeks course at a college or night school?”
Hi David, we don’t hold any face to face courses at present, however all the tutorials are available on this site and if you have any questions, we’re literally a click away for you.
#70 Dominique: “I still do not understand how it will benefit my business other than I will be able to list on several selling platforms from the same forms”
Hi Dominique, Let’s say it takes 100% of your time to create a product on eBay, if you sell on your website and another marketplace, each of these will also take 100% of your time.
If you use a tool like this, it will take 100% of your time in the beginning to create the product record, then a fraction of the time spent to list everywhere else.
Plus also think about being able to collect orders from all your sales channels and being able to process them in one screen and also being able to have stock control across the channels.
Also see the note from Laura in a few questions time.
Hope that helps!
#71 Sharon: “IS this then a stock/order management system like [removed]?”
Hi Sharon, yes it is, but open source and without the huge monthly fees.
#72 Dominique: “I list on Amazon, compared to eBay, a pain in the proverbial, so it would be good to use one single template.”
Hi Dominique, agreed!
#73 Steve: “i dont use ebay for processing its all done in Magento”
Howdy Steve, congrats!
#74 Laura: “Dominique, it can manage you stock qty so you don’t oversell buy selling the same item in more than one place.”
Hi Laura, thanks for helping out.
#75 Shah: “Will you cover shipping carriers also and if it is possible to add one?”
Hi Shah, not in this webinar as there are lots available.
#76 Craig: “too long winded this”
Howdy Craig, we’ve done out best to get this into 60 minutes and explain what we’re doing as we progress along.
If this isn’t for you, we wish you the all the best in your endeavours.
#77 Maria: “Does M2E pro support listing on other ebay sites such as germany, spain,australia,etc?”
Hi Maria, yes M2E Pro does. All the major eBay sites are supported and you can list locally on to them (which is well cool!)
#78 Simon: “can you have 2 payment policies”
Howdy Simon, yes you can. You can create as many as you wish to, just name them aptly though!
#79 Laura: “What about ading in my own listing template?”
Howdy Laura, you can add in your own custom eBay listing template in the description policy like we showed in the webinar. There is also 4 video tutorials on how to do this in M2E Pro in this video course.
#80 Jenni: “Does it translate into eurpoean sites or list in english?”
Hi Jenni, M2E Pro will list with which ever language you have set on your product details in Magento. There are translation tools available for Magento too.
#81 James: “Dave, can you restrict stock quantities from mage to eBay – thinking if you sell over multiple market places, it could get sticky when stock”
Hi James, the short answer is yes. The long answer is that you can create different policies in M2E Pro and restrict as needed.
#82 Donna: “can we add more than 1 ebay id?”
Hi Donna, yes you can :)
#83 David: “can you list 100 products at once and transfer all 100 products to ebay in one go?”
Hi David, yes you can. In fact this is what I would suggest, work on batches of products if you have higher numbers and then complete them as you progress.
#84 Andrew: “Will this work for auctions?”
Hi Andrew, yes it will do. We have a video on YouTube to show you how to do this, how to create both a auction price and reserve price attribute in Magento and where to set them in M2E Pro,
#85 Cliff: “i use turbo lister at the moment is this going to be faster or slower”
Hi Cliff, once you’ve got the hang of things, it will be faster and give you more flexibility. Also remember Turbolister is just for eBay.
#86 Adan: “what if you raech your budget level on ebay due to the quantity of products”
Howdy Adan, you made me giggle. We hit the eBay seller limits in one of the tutorials, this is easy to work around with policies in M2EPro and we have a video tutorial on how to do this right here for you.
#87 Jon: “dont forget to set title >>”
Hi Jon, whoopsy!
I did forget to set the title in the webinar, I only spotted that when listing the product to eBay and hoped no-one would notice :D
#88 Maria: “I have a shop template for ebay listings, can this be mported to M2E pro ?”
Howdy Maria, the eBay store is separate to the listings and would remain unaffected.
#89 Sarah: “This is seeming very complicated as not tech savy”
Hi Sarah, I agree.
I was just like yourself when I first started selling on eBay and the idea of templates and policies is all a bit scary to begin with. I then worked out that they were going to save me heaps of time and I’ve never looked back.
If you do have any questions, we’re never too far away from the forums and remember there is no such thing as a daft question if you don’t know the answer.
#90 Donna: “can you show us how to deal with variation product?”
Hi Donna, we just couldn’t fit this into 60 minutes.
It’s straight forwards to do and we have a video course on this just for you :) It’s 4 tutorials and will take just over an hour, plus examples are included too.
#91 David: “Well guys my mind as been blown to pieces.”
Howdy David, I hope that’s a good thing :)
#92 Sarah: “Thanks Dave, I am just having a megento website being built will this help with my ebay listings?”
Hi Sarah, yes it will do, as the products you’re adding into Magento can be used on eBay too, saving you time and also your eBay orders can be pulled into Magento and the stock levels kept correct.
#93 Sharon: “We sell on various EBay site, Amazon and Websites and have over 8000 products , could these be easily downloaded in bulk to Magento?”
Hi Sharon, the eBay products yes when I complete exportmylistings, the Amazon products, tricky as you can only export the stock number, price, condition and quantity.
#94 Sharon: “Also have 2 Zencart sites which we want to convert to Magento based – is there help on this in Understanding-e?”
Hi Sharon, I’m afraid not.
We won’t be covering the conversion from other website products as it will just get too deep too quickly. However as both sites are PHP & MySQL based, there are millions of developers available that can help you on freelancing websites such as oDesk or Elance.
#95 Cliff: “will ebay updates automatically be updated on this system”
Howdy Cliff, yes.
When you saw me adding in the eBay account, a few moments afterwards we saw the blue bar move across the screen, this was M2E Pro updating for eBay UK.
#96 Alan: “Is it possible to bulk import products for M2E?”
Howdy Alan, yes there is. There are couple of questions like this above, the tool you want is called Magmi and yes we have video tutorials to show you how to use it.
#97 Robert: “my item got an error - A shipping service is specified more than once. Select a different shipping service or remove the duplicate service.”
Howdy Robert, I can’t believe you tried to follow us along live, 10/10 for effort !!!!
In your shipping policy, you have a duplicate shipping method, eBay won’t allow that.
#98 James: “whats the mage compatability of the plugin? 1.7?”
Howdy James, M2E pro is compatible with these versions right now, newer versions compatibility is assumed:
Compatible Magento Versions: 1.4, 1.4.1.1, 1.4.2, 1.5, 1.6, 1.6.1, 1.6.2.0, 1.7, 1.8 & 1.8.1
#99 Dominique: “That’s all good, but will listing with Magenta INCREASE MY SALES? - Would my listings have better visibily?”
Hi Dominique, using any 3rd party tool will not help you give you better visibility on eBay.
It will however help you and your business grow by putting in the foundations to help you become more streamlined.
#100 Kerm: “Is there a tool to convert OScommerce store to Magento?”
Hi Kerm, yes there are several out there varying in quality & price.
#101 Simon: “can you send an item to auction that was in normal stock?”
Hi Simon, yes you can do. A tip here would be to make a separate listing group in M2EPro just for auctions to help organise your listings more easily for you.
#102 James: “can the ebay orders appear in the sales > order tab??”
Howdy James, yes they can indeed and in the webinar we show you this working live.
#103 Sharon: “Do EBay rate Magento users higher in searches? :D”
Howdy Sharon, unfortunately not to my knowledge.
#104 Lauren: “Can any Ebay refunds, etc be done via Magento?”
Hi Lauren, right now the answer is no, but as shown in the Webinar, the link to PayPal is one click away and will take you to the PayPal payment. This will be available in later versions.
#105 Matt: “can you show how we print a invoice to send with the item?”
Hi Matt, I skipped that as the default Magento invoices look pants and we have an extension that gives you far more flexibility caled ShipEasy.
#106 Matt: “Does this integrate with Royal Mail Despatch Manager Online and couriers?”
Howdy Matt, yes it does and we cover this at the end in the costs section. Do note that with the courier extensions, they’re all typically one off costs.
#107 Doug: “Does Magento store what you paid for the item?”
Hi Doug, yes it does there is a cost field available.
It should be note that Magento is not a accounting system and does not work with things like FIFO etc…. you’ll need an accounts package for that.
#108 Maria: “Are you able to export a sales report at the end of the month which separates sales from each channel ?”
Hi Maria, Magento comes with several reporting tools built in. If they don’t meet your needs there are multiple options for reporting in Magento via extensions off the shelf.
#109 Simon: “any idea the cost fo the rmdmo extension Dave?”
Hi Simon, £149 and if you say that we sent you, you should get free installation & setup too.
#110 Lauren: “Is there any way of differentiating Ebay orders in the orders admin?”
Hi Lauren, yes there is.
There is an extension called ShipEasy which will colour code your orders, do several cool things AND let you add in a custom image for each store view in Magento.
Note: By using separate storeviews, this is how you can separate your sales channels out in Magento. See here for screenshot.
#111 Robert: “This is a better platform than turbo lister for sure, but more complex”
Howdy Robert, oh yea!
#112 Jag: “How to implement a Magneto based web site for a existing eBay business? Will M2E Pro update the eBay listings automatically based on sku?”
Howdy Jag, to answer the first part of your question, this is covered in the tutorials. The second part on the updating eBay based upon sku, the answer is yes it will do, but you’ll need to match them up first for existing eBay listings.
#113 Wendy: “Can I use multiple ebay shops”
Hi Wendy, yes you can. M2EPro supports multiple eBay accounts and multiple eBay sites.
#114 Adele: “Is there a way to remove the completed orders away from the processing orders? (just like on eBay where theyd move to sold items) and to add”
Hi Adele, with the ShipEasy extension you can colour code the orders and also it’s dead simple to filter orders by status in Magento (infact ShipEasy allows you to group them by status as well).
However if you did want to archive orders there are extensions that enable you to do this and remove them from the default Orders view in Magento.
#115 David: “So, Magento can manage all listing descriptions for EBay, Amazon and Websites – just one listing for each product ?”
Howdy David, yes that’s exactly the idea :)
#116 Wendy: “does it work with multilistings in Ebay”
Howdy Wendy, yes M2EPro can support single and multi variation listings.
#117 Palo: “will this presentation be available to download as i forgot and missed most of it?”
Howdy Palo, yes, see the top of this page for the recording.
#118 David: “Hi, My Magento screen looks different and I don’t have the bullet point options on my new product screen. Is the because I have Magento Go?”
Howdy David, we noted during the webinar that we have tweaked Magento to suit the marketplaces, adding in several attributes and re-arranging the attribute sets were one part of this.
You can find out why and how in this video course.
#119 Bryony: “Can you please confirm the cost total or per month for M2E & Magento”
Hi Bryony, this is difficult to answer as it depends upon your needs, we do explain the costs in the latter part of the webinar and above too.
#120 Phil: “is there an audit trail to get historical data when products/prices etc are chamged”
Hi Phil, not out of the box, but there are Magento extensions that can do this for you.
#121 Hershil: “can you also manage the prices using .csv and upload them in bulk”?
Howdy Hershil, absolutely. If you have lots of products then this would be the way to go. Just search for Magmi on our website for the tutorials.
#122 Sid: “Can I import in all currect products that I have on Ebay Also, will it import in the HTML coding and mess up the listing on my website ?”
Howdy Sid, M2EPro will import the listings when they’re sold, but the description area will import ALL the HTML. If you’re using a separate tool then you can grab the descriptions from there or it will be a case of manually cutting them out.
#123 Palo: “can it be synced with play?”
Hi Palo, yes, play is supported in M2EPro.
#124 Patrick: “Could you provide the names of the bulk shipping extensions which you just mentioned exist?”</stron