Amazon-Shopify integration is more than just selling on two platforms to take advantage of the benefits of each. Amazon Shopify integration will improve your brand visibility and increase your sales. It will also make it easier for you to do both.
Setting up an entirely new online store can be intimidating to think about. The steps below cover Amazon Shopify integration in simple steps so you can get everything prepared and done without hassles.
Amazon Marketplace Benefits
Amazon is the king of the eCommerce world. The number of buyers increases year over year, presenting a growing opportunity to sell more. The number of sellers is also increasing, despite stricter policies. This means that sellers are willing to take what Amazon dishes out because they recognize how great it is to be able to sell on Amazon.
Customer Base
The best thing about Amazon is its large and loyal customer base. Sellers don’t need to spend time, effort or money building their own audiences and refining them through sales funnels. Millions of customers flood the marketplace on a daily basis, and they trust Amazon. Sellers can, therefore, go straight to making a good impression to draw shoppers to their product pages. This saves them the resources they need to compete with larger sellers.
Expanded Targeted Reach
Amazon sellers can reach an international pool of their target customers by selling through different Amazon marketplaces. There are currently 14 available marketplaces worldwide, and the retail giant shows no signs of stopping.
Fulfillment by Amazon
The next best thing about Amazon is their fulfillment network. Using FBA takes care of another huge headache for sellers. Instead of fussing over storing, picking, packing, shipping, and tracking orders, Amazon does it all. If anything goes wrong, they take responsibility for it, too. (This can be tricky because sometimes it’s a toss-up between taking a hit to keep customers happy or getting a reimbursement by making customers follow Amazon return policies, but FBA is generally an enormous help.)
Growth Opportunities
Amazon is known as the customer-focused retailer, but the emphasis on customer satisfaction is ultimately conversion-focused. The marketplace makes continuous improvements to boost sales using its A9 algorithm to optimize featured offerings. This provides new opportunities for sellers.
One exclusive opportunity is their affiliate program, Amazon Associates. It is the most popular affiliate marketing program around.
Amazon also has a wide range of categories, which means a wide range of products you can sell. Moreover, customers will never be in short supply on Amazon because they enjoy the ability to compare different product options and pricing from different sellers.
Getting paid on Amazon is also hassle-free. Payments for orders are generally deposited straight into your seller bank account every week or two.
Shopify Platform Benefits
Shopify gives you the freedom to build your own store so you can show more of your brand’s unique identity. This is almost impossible on Amazon because of the pre-set design options (even for A+ content). Amazon Shopify integration, therefore, gives you the benefits of branding on top of all that an Amazon presence has to offer.
Having a Shopify store also guarantees that you can keep on selling even if you get in trouble on Amazon. (With all the rules that are changing all the time, it can be hard not to.) When both stores are running smoothly, it, of course, means that you’re selling more because you’re selling in two places. The bonus advantage here of Amazon Shopify integrations is that BFA can take care of your Shopify orders, too. Shopify is also expanding to serve customers in some 175 countries, so it’s a great platform itself for reaching a wide audience.
Shopify in itself is a powerful and popular selling platform. Store setup is fairly simple compared to other eCommerce solutions. It takes just a few hours to complete the basic setup and launch the store. You also don’t have to be huge to start using Shopify – it grows with your business. The monthly subscription fees are affordable and tiered, and there are free as well as premium designs and apps. Hosting is a big problem for a lot of independent stores, and Shopify shines here with secure and free SSL on hosting that boasts 99.9% uptime.
Shopify also has its own setup for product page optimization and design customization and apps that you can add to your store to do all sorts of things. Some notables are Google Shopping integration, customer engagement tools, dropshipping tools, payment options, promotions, integrations with other websites and online sales channels, and of course, Amazon Shopify integration.
If you run into any issues with your store, Shopify customer support is available around the clock through email, phone, and live chat. App developers also provide support for their products.
Requirements for Amazon Shopify Integration
Before you jump straight into the integration, it helps to have everything you need to be prepared so you can go straight through the process. It makes things so much easier to set up.
Amazon Professional Seller Account
You can’t do the integration on an individual account. If you need to upgrade, note that you will pay $39.99 per month for a professional seller account plus other selling fees that depend on the categories you’re selling in.
Amazon Marketplaces
You need a third-party Shopify Amazon integration app if you are not on an Amazon North America account. If you are, the integration will depend on your set currency – USD or CAD. If it’s USD, you need to integrate a United States account, and if it’s CAD, then you’ll use a Canada account.
Product Information
Have all the details about your products ready for upload. These include the manufacturer’s brand, item variants, available inventory, ASINs, SKUs, UPCs or EANs (unless they qualify for GTIN exemption), and other important product attributes.
Policies, FAQ, About, and Contact Pages
You need to have clear policies on customer data privacy and security, returns and refunds, and terms of service. If you need guidance, you can use Amazon’s policies or Shopify’s samples to get you started. You also need to prepare content for your home page, about page, and contact page.
Shopify Store
If your store is ready to go, you can jump down to “Amazon Sales Channel”
If your existing Shopify store needs improvement, get that done. It will help your brand image so much and increase your conversion rate, too.
If you don’t have a Shopify store yet, go to Shopify, start your 14-day trial, and start building your store. For this, you’ll need basic brand materials and business information. These include your store name, logo, domain, business address and phone number, TIN or EIN, bank account, and page content. The entire set-up process will take you just a few hours if you have all these details ready.
Importing Products
Using the available CSV import option to pull in products from Amazon may look like the simplest solution. It’s not the best, though, and you’ll end up spending more time and patience changing out poor images and fixing variation errors.
To make sure everything is perfectly aligned, you can either manually create products in Shopify or use the ByteStand app to import automatically if you’re using FBA. Either way, this is how you get high-resolution images and all the correct details in the right format.
ByteStand offers a 7-day trial, so you don’t have to pay for it once you have everything done. Follow the app instructions to connect your Amazon account, then choose the Amazon shipping rates you want to make available to Shopify customers. You can also charge more or less than Amazon on the same screen.
If you choose ByteStand, it will run in the background so you can choose and customize your theme and upload other page content while you’re waiting. Once it’s done, you simply go to Apps and click on ByteStand, enter the menu and “Push all products.” You can still do manual updates any time you want with the Pull and Push features, or set up the Scheduler to sync product inventory for you.
Collections and Menus
Organize your products into collections to make the customer experience better. Customers are happy when they can find what they want easily. You can create as many collections as you want based on different item attributes or uses.
Then make sure that you get your pages and collections organized onto your header and footer menus.
Payment, Checkout, and Shipping
Shopify Payments is the easiest option because it comes fully integrated. You can start with this and explore other options that suit you better once your Amazon Shopify integration is complete.
The easiest checkout setting is the automatic option. If you want, you can also allow customers to create accounts and tell Shopify how you want orders to be processed.
Shipping takes a bit more effort because you need Amazon to be able to automatically fulfill your Shopify orders. To complete this step, you’ll need to upgrade to a paid plan. (You’ll find the option under Settings à Account à Account overview.) If you’re not sure what tier you need, start with the basic $29 per month plan.
Call Shopify to enable carrier calculated shipping rates so that Amazon can calculate them for you. Don’t let them talk you into upgrading your plan – you don’t need to. It costs $20 per month a la carte on a basic Shopify account, and then becomes free after a year. (You can also choose to offer free shipping on all orders to avoid the additional charge, but make sure you are still making a profit.)
Domain and Launch
Connect your domain to your store and preview it. Make any necessary tweaks to make it attractive and easy to navigate. Once you’re satisfied, you can go live by removing the password protection under the Online store menu and start selling!
Steps for Amazon Shopify Integration
Add Amazon as a sales channel in Shopify and connect it. Then link your existing Amazon product listings on the Amazon listings page in Shopify. (FBA or SFP products will not show there.) Choose to allow Shopify to manage your inventory so you don’t have to manually update it.
Don’t allow customers to purchase products that are out of stock if you’re using Amazon to fulfill orders. You can also choose Amazon to manage inventory in this case so it’s synced based on the inventory you have at Amazon.
Final Thoughts
Having your own store always leaves customer acquisition in your hands. There are tools to help you, but you have to pay for them and run them. Shopify Amazon Integration immediately connects your brand with a loyal customer base that is ready to purchase. That alone is huge because going from optimization to visitors to conversions to loyalty takes a lot out of you.
Getting discovered on Amazon and using other channels to filter additional traffic are avenues that you can use to increase sales many times over. The combination of the Amazon name and your branding are a powerhouse. After Amazon Shopify integration, you will have more time and money to build a presence on other channels that will drive even more sales. The most powerful thing about a multi-channel strategy is that it brings your brand directly to where consumers are. This way, you can focus on understanding them and building a niche audience instead of throwing all your efforts into trying to bring people to you.
You can also get free additional advertising on Amazon as you improve and maintain your performance scores and organic rankings. And don’t forget the popular affiliate program that can get thousands of people advertising your product for free on myriad channels.
