For those of you that do a lot of buying and selling, is there a site or tool that manages and posts inventory to multiple sites?

[RH | 5,336]

I got a bunch of stuff I need to move.  My income has been steady enough, and I've had enough "fun money" over the past 5 years I've been collecting that most of the stuff I've picked up in lots and such that I've never wanted or need, I've had no need in selling.  Some of this stuff is especially going up in value.  Not much, but worth selling individually or in small lots.

This makes me want to start a small "shop" but I also don't want to limit myself to just eBay.  I'd also like to post this stuff to Amazon, maybe FB Market Place (but I have never used FB) and maybe those app tools like Mercari/LetGo/OfferUp.

Does anyone know of a tool that allows you to setup inventory within that application, and then it posts your inventory to all of them.  When an item sales (or you flag it as sold), it clears out the inventory on all of the sites.  I'm positive such a tool has to exist.  Does anyone know of and use a good one?

[BlackVega | 583]

Such an underrated topic without any responses. I also want to know the answers. As far as I can tell you can manually do some programming on your own via the API of each site but whether there is any sort of tool that does everything for you- I want to know myself. I searched around for this sort of stuff before but didn't find anything related, maybe I found some sort of tool once that does some sort of online marketing but this is usually targeted towards big companies or you wouldn't even afford it in any way...

Edited August 27, 2020 by VegaVegas

[RH | 5,336]

1 hour ago, VegaVegas said:

Such an underrated topic without any responses. I also want to know the answers. As far as I can tell you can manually do some programming on your own via the API of each site but whether there is any sort of tool that does everything for you- I want to know myself. I searched around for this sort of stuff before but didn't find anything related, maybe I found some sort of tool once that does some sort of online marketing but this is usually targeted towards big companies or you wouldn't even afford it in any way...

That was my general observation as well.  It makes sense that an at-home/small business seller would like a single app to post to Amazon/Ebay/Etsy and, maybe, Craigslist.  But, I didn't find anything like that.

[arch_8ngel | 1,597]

Do all of those sites allow cross-listing in their T&C's?

 

[RH | 5,336]

9 minutes ago, arch_8ngel said:

Do all of those sites allow cross-listing in their T&C's?

 

Honestly, I don't know.  I know the reason they'd give for that, but it's kind of B.S.  That's a good point.

[dr_orangejuicer | 20]

Been selling for many years and have always done this manually. I avoid cross-listing on multiple platforms unless I have stock to cover all platforms (with the occasional goof, nobody's perfect). I suppose there might be a tool that a third party has developed that will allow you to have centralized inventory and, with access to your accounts on multiple platforms, could pull inventory as it's sold but that seems...complicated and almost certainly NOT free. I can't imagine it being worthwhile for small-time sellers but I'm something of a luddite so maybe I'm just missing out...

I would suggest learning what inventory does better on different platforms and listing strategically. For example: for me, Jaguar games sell VERY poorly on Amazon compared to Ebay. Games that command a premium due to condition also tend to do better on Ebay. I've looked briefly at new selling apps like those you mentioned and have not gotten on board yet. The items I sell are rarely sold there so tracking the occasional Mercari sale (or wherever) just seems like more trouble than it's worth (i.e. I'm now tracking sales, disbursements, AND inventory for an additional platform that generates very few sales relative to the bigger players). This is just how I see things and what works for me, ymmv of course. Hope this helps.

[phart010 | 1,804]

Letgo died a while back. OfferUp was good but started slowing down, I think their audience moved to Mercari.
 

Now letgo and offerup are merged, but I don’t think they’re gonna gain steam. Mercari is just so clean looking and easy to use. I’m always finding all the new stuff on there.. from time to time I’ll still look at letgo/offerup but it’s really a ghost town for retro games.

I would just do Mercari and eBay. They both allow you to cancel sales in case the item has become unavailable, although it may end up hurting you if you do that too often.
 

Amazon is without doubt the largest online market place, but I feel that people will only pay a premium for retro games if they can actually see the item,  which happens to be something Amazon does not do well. Amazon is best for selling new items

Edited September 17, 2020 by phart010

[oops | 85]

I used google one drive you can edit it and its updated live and people can view it, you can also sort by console etc etc

[nick | 61]

I built one myself (it isn't publicly available, and isn't in a state where it would be publicly-usable currently) but it took fucking forever and eBay's API is shit and full of weird nuances and special cases (e.g. "for THIS listing you must specify the UPC", "for THIS listing you must specify the MPN", "for THIS listing you need to say if it's used or new but 'Like New' isn't allowed to be picked for seemingly no reason whatsoever", etc), and the only other place I had my inventory listed was an online store that I never publicly launched. I kept saying I was gonna integrate Amazon and a store point-of-sale system but never got that far. I don't care anymore. I'm just gonna list places manually from now on I think. It's not worth the time to me to try and fuck with eBay's stupid sucky overly-pointlessly-complicated API.

There's also no good/easy way (that I've found) to update inventory sold on eBay in your local app, like the only way to do it (I've found) is to manually keep periodically sending requests to eBay to check the current quantities and if any have been sold or not. You'd THINK there would be a way to send some sort of simple HTTP request with some simple JSON data from eBay to an endpoint associated with your app that they have registered in their system, but NO of course it isn't that simple, because nothing is that simple with eBay.

eBay's API documents are a cluttered confusing mess. Basically eBay is totalitarian and THEY want to be the place where you manage all your inventory and quantity and stuff. eBay wants to be the center of your inventory management system. eBay does NOT want any other 3rd party app to be the center of an inventory management system. So they make it super pain in the ass to do things unless you submit and let them be the center of your inventory management system (which is not a viable option for any good/smart business owner).

Edited October 4, 2021 by nick

[nick | 61]

On 9/17/2020 at 1:28 PM, phart010 said:

 

Amazon is without doubt the largest online market place, but I feel that people will only pay a premium for retro games if they can actually see the item,  which happens to be something Amazon does not do well. Amazon is best for selling new items

Yeah agreed. Amazon and eBay are very VERY different beasts. There was a time where they were both sort-of-kind-of competing with each other. They still do compete in many ways, but they've both sort of found their own identities now too which is cool. The difference is:

• eBay is for antiques and collectibles. individual photos of each item are necessary.
• Amazon is for moving product/inventory. hopefully a fuck ton of product and in large quantities and sold QUICKLY. stock photos are fine.

As time continues eBay will keep going down the path of being a marketplace for collectors and the collector markets, and Amazon will keep going down a path of offering products to be used for their utility purpose. For example, it would not make sense to sell a VGA or Wata graded video game on Amazon, because that's not what the purpose of Amazon is.  For collectibles, it has to be eBay, and it's also more time consuming to sell antiques/collectibles, because each one sort of requires some level of individual attention to list and sell it properly (e.g. taking individual pics, writing a quick description, etc), and you can generally only get small quantities at a time (usually only 1) of collectible items that you'd list on eBay. For Amazon, you only have to list it once, and if you have a source where you can get 1000s of quantity of it, then once the listing is set up, then they just sort of sell on auto-pilot and it creates a machine that shoves $$$ into your bank account.

It's much MUCH easier to make a fuck ton of money on Amazon.

Edited October 4, 2021 by nick