Imagine you own an antiques store in your hometown. One day, a genie pops out of the lamp you’re cleaning and offers to replicate your storefront in five neighboring towns.
But there’s a catch—the stores won’t talk to each other, so you’ll have to drive back and forth to reconcile orders and inventory levels. Do you take the genie up on his offer?
If you sell products through multiple online marketplaces, you’re familiar with this dilemma. You won’t need to physically drive between storefronts, but you will need to devote a lot of time to maintaining consistency across multiple unconnected sales channels.
Marketplace integration is a better option. Here’s how to use it to efficiently sell on multiple marketplaces so you can reach new customers and boost sales.
What is marketplace integration?
Marketplace integration is the process of synchronizing inventory and product data between your online store and marketplaces like Etsy, Amazon, and eBay to make multichannel selling easier. Marketplace integration software consolidates data from different platforms to keep inventory levels up to date, saving time, ensuring consistency across sales channels, and simplifying inventory and order management processes.
How to get started with marketplace integration
- Decide which marketplace to integrate
- Choose your source of truth
- Select marketplace integration software
- Connect your marketplaces
Ecommerce integration can streamline operations for multichannel ecommerce businesses, allowing you to sell on more channels without massively increasing your workload or error risk. Here’s how to get started:
1. Decide which marketplaces to integrate
Take stock of the online marketplaces you currently use and research any additional marketplaces you may want to join in the future. Amazon, eBay, Etsy, and Walmart are all popular marketplaces.
Commission structures, audiences, seller rules, and popular product categories vary by marketplace, so evaluate each of these aspects when considering new sales channels for your business.
2. Choose your source of truth
Next, you’ll decide which platform you’ll use as your primary source of truth—your ecommerce store or a marketplace integration service. In most cases, this will also be where you manage orders and inventory.
If your ecommerce platform provides a comprehensive set of inventory and order management features and most of your sales channels integrate directly with your site, you might use your online store as your source of truth. In this case, you’ll use marketplace integration software to transfer data from other sales channels to your store’s back end.
Many platforms offer one or more native integrations. Shopify Marketplace Connect, for example, allows business owners to integrate their online stores with Amazon, Etsy, Walmart, eBay, and Target Plus. Additionally, the Shopify App Store offers a variety of marketplace integration apps.
If your ecommerce platform is limited or you only sell on marketplaces, you might instead look for a marketplace integrator designed to replace an ecommerce website’s inventory and order management system. These tools consolidate data from different channels, allowing business owners to manage connected sales channels from the marketplace integrator’s centralized dashboard.
3. Select marketplace integration software
Next, choose your marketplace integration software. Start by researching your ecommerce platform’s native tools, then consider third-party tools if one or more of your marketplaces won’t directly integrate with your ecommerce platform.
Consider the following:
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Features and type. If you plan to use a marketplace integrator as your central source of truth, choose a tool with a user-friendly dashboard that allows you to manage inventory, track order status, and update product listings across channels. If you’ll use your ecommerce site’s dashboard, look for tools that can pull necessary information into your site’s back end.
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Compatibility. Review compatibility with your site and marketplaces. Many businesses use multiple ecommerce integration tools, but the fewer tools you have to manage, the easier the process will be. Look for tools that do double-duty where possible.
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Cost. Marketplace integration software costs vary widely, with some offering introductory rates ranging from $10 to $30 per month and others operating on a commission structure. Many platforms also offer multiple pricing tiers, allowing you to scale up as you add new marketplaces or increase sales.
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Customer support. Quality customer support can streamline the process of integrating tools and help you troubleshoot issues as they arise. Review support options, and select a platform that offers your desired level of support.
4. Connect your marketplaces
Once you’ve chosen your marketplaces and integration tools, sign up for marketplace seller accounts (if you have not done so already) and connect each account to your market integration software. Exactly what this process looks like will depend on the tool, your ecommerce platform, and your chosen marketplaces.
If you’re using Shopify Connect, for example, you’ll download the Shopify Marketplace Connect app and connect your marketplace accounts directly from your Shopify Admin.
Some tools offer AI and machine learning technology that can automatically reformat listings and optimize them for different marketplaces. If your chosen tool doesn’t include this feature, you may need to manually reformat listings according to each marketplace’s specs.
Best marketplace integration tools
- Shopify Marketplace Connect
- Nabu for Google Shopping Feed
- Tipo Multistore Inventory Sync
- Marketplace Connect by Tom I.T.
When you’re ready to begin the marketplace integration process, here are four popular tools to consider:
1. Shopify Marketplace Connect
Shopify Marketplace Connect is Shopify’s native marketplace integration app. It supports marketplaces like Amazon, Target Plus, Walmart, eBay, and Etsy, allowing users to manage listings and orders and monitor inventory from the Shopify dashboard. You can also use it to measure performance across connected marketplaces.
The app is free to install and includes unlimited marketplaces and up to 50 free marketplace orders per month. It charges a 1% fee per order on additional orders, with total fees capped at $99 per month. It supports English, German, French, Spanish, and Italian, and includes automatic currency conversion for selling in international markets.
2. Nabu for Google Shopping Feed
The Nabu for Google Shopping Feed service allows businesses to integrate their stores with Google Shopping, Facebook Shops, Instagram Shopping, Microsoft Shopping, TikTok Shop, Pinterest Catalogs, and other shopping feeds. It also uses AI technology to automatically optimize product listings and synchronize product data and product reviews across channels.
Nebu’s free plan integrates with Shopify Markets and allows users to bulk edit up to 1,000 products. Paid plans start at $29.99 a month and include AI optimization, multiple languages and currencies, and Facebook, Instagram, Bing, Snapchat, TikTok, Pinterest, and X integrations.
3. Tipo Multistore Inventory Sync
Tipo Multistore Inventory Sync supports order management, inventory management, and data management, allowing users to sync product listings and other pages from their online store to destination stores on multiple marketplaces.
The free version of the app lets users connect to unlimited stores and allows up to 250 product variants. Higher-tier plans have higher product variant limits, support CSV uploads, and include a seven-day free trial. Paid plans start at $9 per month.
4. Marketplace Connect by Tom I.T.
Marketplace Connect by Tom I.T. is an inventory management, order management, and product data synchronization tool. It’s compatible with multiple marketplaces, including Amazon, Podfoods, eBay, bol, and Etsy, offers real-time synchronization of customer, inventory, and order data, and allows you to track and manage marketplace orders directly in Shopify admin.
Marketplace Connect's Starter plan is $19.99 a month per marketplace integration. It includes unlimited marketplace integrations and up to 50 marketplace orders per month (for additional orders, you’ll need to upgrade to a higher tier). All tiers offer unlimited tracking, inventory updates, and chat support.
Marketplace integration FAQ
What does marketplace integration mean?
Ecommerce marketplace integration refers to the use of integration software to connect your ecommerce store to other sales channels—specifically online marketplaces like Etsy, Amazon, and eBay. Marketplace integration software can pull customer, order, and inventory data from multiple marketplaces into a single dashboard and use real-time sync to keep product listings and inventory levels up to date.
What is the marketplace model?
An ecommerce marketplace is an online platform where sellers list products under their own brands, set their own prices, and handle order processing and communication with customers. Sellers typically pay fees or commissions to list products on the marketplace.
