Marketplace Integration

Marketplace integration means selling on Amazon, Noon, Jumia or a site like them from the same system that runs your own shop. You enter a product once. The system sends it out to each marketplace, then pulls the orders back into one screen, so your staff pack them the same way they pack an order from your website.

People do it for the traffic. Millions of shoppers search on those sites before they search anywhere else, and they buy from a name they have never heard of because the marketplace stands behind the sale. A small brand can be seen there in a week by more people than in a year on its own.

Price and stock are where it goes wrong. Sell your last five units on Amazon while your own site still shows them, and you have taken money for something you cannot send. Cancel too often and the marketplace pushes you down the list or closes the account. One product needs one stock number shared by every channel, and it has to travel both ways in minutes rather than overnight.

The commission is the second surprise. Depending on the category, expect roughly eight to twenty per cent of the sale price, then fees for storage, delivery, payment and advertising on top. A product you sell at a twenty-five per cent margin can end the month earning you almost nothing. Do that sum per product before you list, not after the first statement arrives.

The third point is the one sellers notice too late. The customer is not yours. The marketplace keeps the name, the email and the address, so you cannot write to that buyer next month, and if your account is closed you lose all of them in a day. Treat a marketplace as rented ground and your own shop as the land you own.

Storek holds one product record behind every channel and writes each marketplace fee onto the order, so the profit you see is the profit you kept. When Linkysoft connects a shop to a marketplace, the work usually becomes a small web application, because every site names its fields differently and each has its own rules on titles, photographs and returns. Ask whoever builds it who repairs the listings when those rules change. They change often, and Linkysoft has watched a busy listing vanish after a week of cancelled orders.