Cracking multichannel publications on Etsy, eBay, Shopify

Hints to move product listings among e-commerce channels

Picture 1: example of the Dashboard of a modern multi-channel e-commerce tool.

I daily see online sellers moving their e-commerce listings across online channels. This is a good practice to win more exposure and ultimately more sales, but it is not necessarily an easy walk, despite some software vendors market today useful tools to make it easier.

One of the tricky parts is that different channels have different rules, which seldom software tools can manage entirely. There is hence some manual work to do. Below some of the most important constraints that you should know to make your multi-channel e-commerce easier.

Publishing to Etsy

It is common knowledge that you can list on Etsy just self-made products, vintage items, and tools or components to make products, but Etsy has some more constraints at the time we write:

1. Etsy does not manage pictures per variant.
   If you use a tool such as Nembol, Sellbrite, GoDataFeed, or others, to extract your listings from say eBay or Shopify and publish them on Etsy, be prepared to say goodbye to the pictures you assigned to each color or material or size. Some tools will keep the pictures and assign them to the product, some others will ignore and trash them.
2. Etsy expects all variants in a listing.
   If you import a product from say eBay, that has for instance two options with 2 values each ( e.g. Color: Black, Red, and Size: Large, Small), the resulting number of variants is 4 (black-large, black-small, red-large, red-small). Well, Etsy expects to receive all four. You may delete any of these variants in Shopify or eBay or in your Amazon sellercentral (for instance because you sold-out or because you never intended to stock that SKU in the first place), but when you try to automatically transfer such a listing in Etsy, you will get an error.
   SOLUTION: first publish a full listing in Etsy, and later put out-of-stock the unwanted or non-existing variations.
3. Max quantity in Etsy is 999 items
   Some users like to set a large number in their availability field meaning that they have “Unlimited availability”. Well, this practice has to be limited to 999 items, because Etsy will not accept quantities in 4 digits.
4. Etsy does not accept HTML listings
   Shopify does, eBay does, WooCommerce to some extent does. Just Etsy does not. Etsy accepts only line breaks. Again: if you move listings to Etsy from other channels using an automated tool, make sure such tool controls HTML tags.

Publishing to Shopify

Shopify is very flexible and its users love it, as well as developers working with it. Still there are some rules biting you when you automatically move listings to Shopify:

1. Your Shopify product title cannot be longer than 255 characters.
   Although this doesn’t seem an issue to most of us, it turns out that no few eBay sellers use very long titles to attract more users from the search. This was a common practice some time ago, but we recently saw this error blocking ebay listings from being automatically moved to Shopify. Ebay sellers beware, make your listings short!
2. Shopify accepts maximum 100 variants per product.
   So, if you have 10 options with up to 10 values each, you’ll have 100 variants and will barely be ok in Shopify. Just add one more, and the listing will not go through. Same if you have 2*50 or 3*33 and so on.

Publishing to ebay

Ebay is a legacy system in itself, stratified and typically with different constraints for sellers in different categories and in different ebay national sites. Let’s see some.

1. Names of options in eBay must be consistent.
   We saw some users importing from Shopify and exporting to eBay listings with option value “blk” and “BLK”. While Shopify accepts this naming, ebay blocks such a listing and returns error code 21926582.
2. Ebay payment rules must be consistent with product type.
   If you publish a custom-made product for instance, you cannot ask for instant-payment. Ebay will simply block your listing and you’ll have to modify your Payment Business rule.
3. Ebay does not accept dots in a word.
   They have a control working to avoid ebay sellers to post links to their domain names. The result is that if you for instance have sizes in your Etsy or Shopify listing in the format 2.25 inches, the 2.25 will disappear in your eBay listing. All words with dots in it will disappear from your ebay texts.
4. Ebay error list..
   Curious to know how many error you may get while listing in ebay? They tried to list them all, click here to access the public list.. They stopped counting at error №21,919,476.

Bottomline: if you want to gain more sales, it’s right that you are trying to publish your listings on several online channels, but since different marketplaces and e-commerce engine have different rules, you should try to design your listings according to correct standards.

Hopefully this post will help you avoid the biggest design faults.