Amazon Australia: An opportunity for retailers running Magento

If you can’t beat them, join them: extend your Magento store into Amazon with Codisto Linq

Things got a little complicated when Amazon has plunged into the Australian market. And it anticipated to outperform competitors by its ultra-automated retail operation.

The presence of the US online retail giant is expected to affect the sales performance of major local businesses – such Harvey Norman, JB Hi-Fi, and Myers – and possibly small-scale online enterprises too.

The smarter operators, big or small, will have planned ahead and mitigated this risk.

Amazon is an opportunity, not a threat

If you can’t outdo your rival, you may as well join them and gain some advantage for yourself. Having said that, you can sign up as Amazon seller through their AU seller program. With the retailer’s global customer base, the potential is there to expand your brand and boost your revenue at scale.

Now that you have registered as a seller, what are you going to do with your product listing and inventory? Should you start from scratch again?

Those running Magento will know how painful this can be.

Push your Magento inventory to Amazon with Codisto Linq

Codisto Linq saves you from the trouble of running your Magento and Amazon stores as separate entities. It enables you to create and manage your entire Amazon product catalog directly from Magento, via real-time synchronization of your inventory and orders on both platforms.

Also, Codisto has innovative “template editing and logic, custom attribute mapping, advanced freight functionality and multi-account support” to configure a more sophisticated shopping experience.

The Amazon integration has been built as an extension to eBay as well, leveraging the same powerful, tried and tested functions (and also giving you the option to set up an eBay Store too).

If this sounds like an interesting solution, you can try it for free for 30 days:

• Step 1 – Apply to become an Amazon seller through its seller program.
• Step 2 – Install and configure the Codisto extension. Following the 30-day trial period, you can select any of Codisto’s flexible plans that you think is appropriate for your online store. Unlimited Listings Plans can cost from $29 to $999 per month while Unlimited Orders Plan is priced from $24 to $399 and can be paid monthly or yearly.
• Step 3 – After installing, you can start inventory synchronization between your current online shop platform and your new Amazon store.

Technical considerations

Codisto is a SaaS solution so a lot of the heavy lifting will be taken care of by their own servers, pushing and pulling data to Amazon via APIs.

It’s not a particularly ‘lite’ extension give it handles large inventories and rich product details. That said, it’s a well-architectured product that doesn’t rely on Cron jobs and promises that the ‘customer website browsing experience isn’t affected regardless of the marketplace sync calculations and messages required.’

You will need to check compatibility with any caching function that you’re running. There are known issues with both Extendware Full Page Cache and Amasty Full Page Cache. If you’re running a CDN, you’ll need to make sure that it’s not blocking your updates too.

We generally advise our Magento customers to run their instances on a Virtual Dedicated Server (VDS). If you’re not doing so, this may be a good opportunity to upgrade and benefit from the extra horsepower.