Use the M2E Pro community extension for Magento to consolidate web orders from your Amazon and eBay merchant accounts

If you have an Amazon and/or eBay merchant account, and are considering extending your presence online with a full-blown eCommerce platform, consider Magento and its widely popular M2E extension to tie things together.

Magento, coupled with M2E Pro, will allow you single-point visibility to all order activity. M2E Pro will collect orders from eBay and Amazon and import them into Magento using the standard order series in Magento.
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The benefits of real-time stock quantity updates in the Shopping Cart

Or…conversely titled as ‘The Consequences of Misrepresenting Your Inventory Online’

Last Christmas my wife and I decided to give ourselves a significantly upgraded digital camera from what we currently had. We shopped online and we shopped early, just to make sure that we could use the first present opened to capture the rest of the day’s events. We found a site that offered a great price and confidently ‘pulled the trigger’ on our purchase. Then we waited…and waited…and waited some more. We waited three days past the expected delivery date before making an inquiry. We were informed that the model we had ordered was on “back-order.” Well, it wasn’t on ‘back-order’ when we ordered it! What happened between the time the site indicated ‘In Stock’ and the time we confirmed our purchase?!

The answer to such questions can lie anywhere between unscrupulous business ethics and unintentional gaps in business process. Regardless of the reason, we were absolutely livid. A little better due-diligence on our part would have served us well. It was easy to find a bevy of identical consumer complaints against the same company we had purchased from. It is, unfortunately, a circumstance that happens far too often to trusting online consumers. Just take a trip out to > www.PissedConsumer.com and search the term “website out of stock” to see the vitriol levied against offending merchants. Whether by accident, or by bad design, as an online merchant, you can’t afford to have a permanent record on any such site.
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Is your ‘seamless’ eCommerce integration a drain on your time?

If you are factoring ‘seamless’ eCommerce integration with your accounting system into your shopping cart selection process, don’t fail to exercise due diligence with respect to the claims being made. There are Shopping Carts on the market, commercial and open-source, that advertise ‘accounting integration’ that is often, quite simply, a misrepresentation.
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Considerations when integrating QuickBooks, Peachtree, or Sage 50 with your shopping cart.

We have listed some overarching considerations that should be made when evaluating eCommerce/Accounting integrations. These topics/questions have been adapted from our response to the Sleeter Group blog by Jim Savage regarding In Search of the Perfect QuickBooks Shopping Cart Integration. The content has been expanded to include the Peachtree/Sage 50 accounting platforms and  the answers are in the context of how CartSpan addresses the issues.

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