Shopify To Amazon Variants Listing - App That Can Group Things Differently On The 2 Platforms?

[RandomUsername2]

So I’m going to be making the leap from selling mostly on one marketplace, to setting up a Shopify store and sending out to several marketplaces. I’ve decided on Shopify as my “core” backend. I looked through old posts, and some people asked roughly similar questions, but did not get a solution.

Short Version:

Basically what I want is an app that can map multiple Shopify parent-child products to a single parent-child product on Amazon.

Long Version:

On my website I want certain items listed individually with only different quantities as variants (1 pack, 3, 6 etc) on the individual item page… Otherwise the category pages would literally have a couple items each, and it wouldn’t present much eye candy. This would look small, lame, and boring compared to showing all the different material/color combos, since my products are visually appealing.

But on Amazon I want the listings to be grouped differently, with material/color variations as well as quantity variations on the same parent listing page. This will make it far easier to cross shop the variations on there given how their system works.

I’m not doing shirts, but imagine a website that under the V-Neck and Crew Neck categories it had literally one listing, and then a bunch of drop downs for color on that one listings page… That would look horrible on the category page, so I want to show all the colors as separate on my site… But on Amazon want all the colors and different pack sizes for V-Neck listed together, with a 2nd listing for Crew Neck, etc. Make sense?

Is this possible to do in Shopify? I’m thinking of using CedCommerce’s Amazon integration app as it has pretty much the best reviews, and the same company also offers other integrations I’m interested in, but this one feature alone may make me choose a different one. So if anybody uses their integration and it can do this, it would be great to know. Ditto if they use a different one that does it.

If none of the Shopify integrations do this natively, is there a way to go in and regroup them via the Amazon backend after Shopify sends them over, but not have it break Shopify? I would assume since there’ll be all different SKUs and barcodes everything would still link up for inventory, sales, ect between the two and it shouldn’t really matter how Amazon presents the items to the customer. Or is that a faulty assumption?

Alternatively, if I created a product on Shopify with all the variations as I want to display on Amazon, could I then “break” that one big product on the Shopify backend by splitting it up into more parent-child relationships after the fact? Basically temporarily have it be one big fat listing on on Shopify, send it to Amazon, then split it up?

Yet another concept that occurs to me, is even if they were all one big variation listing on Shopify, is there an app or theme that enables your website to display variations on category pages as if they were individual items? Again, main point being I don’t want category pages with 1-5 listings only. I wouldn’t want to display different quantities, so listing every variation would not be optimal, but if I could select to display each color variant as a faux listing that would be great. Honestly this may be the best solution, as one could still have a Shopify drop down box to change colors/materials no matter what listing one was looking at… Provided there was a way to change the listing page title and description when one changed selections.

That’s not even to mention that at some point I’ll hit the 100 variations limit as I have more products manufactured, and need to figure out how to do proper category structure that’s sensible. I’ll save those for other posts though if I can’t figure them out on my own…

Ugh. Such a simple thing to just say out loud, but how to actually do it?! Any help would be greatly appreciated! And frankly if this is a small custom coding thing, I may be down for that. I really don’t like the 2 options the default setup seems to offer.

[RandomUsername2]

Nothin’? I was really hoping somebody out there would have some real world experience with a similar issue…

Talking to some of the people that make apps, I’ve got a few suggestions, because none seem to be able to do it natively. Still waiting to hear back from one of the popular Amazon apps though.

I got the suggestion of making in Shopify as a single listing with all variants, then sending over to Amazon as a single listing as I want them to appear on Amazon. Then after the fact making new parent listings on Shopify that retain the child/variant SKUs, and disabling the original parent listings. They thought this would keep inventory etc all good, but Amazon would retain the different grouping.

Another suggested sending to Amazon as I want them in Shopify (no color variation), then disabling syncing certain details, and then rearranging on the Amazon back end.

Has anybody ever combined multiple “individual” listings into a single parent-child product on Amazon via their back end? Is it a tedious process? For me it won’t be a one and done situation, as I am coming out with new variants semi frequently, so the first method suggested probably wouldn’t work as well as this one… Assuming it’s not a super lethargic process to add newly created items into an existing parent product on Amazon’s backend.

Any experience on doing this would be appreciated.

[orieg]

Did you ever figure out a solution?

[RandomUsername2]

Hey. Well, yes and no.

I was never able to find any integrations that allowed this to be done automatically or easily on an ongoing basis. I was pretty new to Shopify when I wrote this post, and frankly have been Amazed at the basic functionality EVERY integration I’ve used for basically EVERY platform has been missing! Lots of simple, obvious, data handling stuff just doesn’t exist in a lot of these integrations. Including stuff I was able to do with eBay integrations 20 years ago! No app I found lets you run a store listing AND auction on eBay from the same SKU… Whaaat??? Some might, but it’ll likely be missing some other commonly needed feature. No app seems to do everything they should be able to do. Stuff that’s simple data in, data out from metafields etc. Such things could enable a lot of the more complex data handling needs I, and many others, have in the real world.

But that’s a side issue… I was not able to find anything that could handle this scenario in a reasonable or sensible way. The solution I ended up going with is manually uploading the items to Amazon using their bulk Spreadsheet uploading system. It’s a bit tedious, but once you’ve setup a template for a given “type” of product, it’s not too hard to go through and edit the individual data fields for new products etc. This way I have total control over the Amazon data, without countless data handling limitations found in the integration apps. So everything gets setup RIGHT on Amazon.

Once in Amazon’s backend I then link it up to handle inventory and price only via the “Marketplace Connect” App, which was an independent app when I signed up, but was bought by Shopify directly since then and is now free. This keeps inventory synced, but retains the grouping you setup on Amazon when uploading directly. So it gets it done in the end, but requires a bunch of annoying manual uploading… Unfortunate, but I ended up having to do the same on Walmart as well. The apps just don’t have the level of sophistication they should. Maybe someday they will add this and other abilities.

A fun bonus fact: I started out on Amazon doing just Fulfillment By Merchant, but always planned to do Fulfillment By Amazon AS WELL. Any smart seller (like “experts” on YouTube etc) will tell you to do both if at all possible, as stock WILL run out from time to time on FBA, and it’ll inevitably happen when Amazon’s warehouses are busy and being REALLY slow to check in new inventory (or when they lose an item, or whole order, etc!), and then it auto defaults to self fulfillment, hence allowing sales to continue. I discovered that Marketplace Connect has NO WAY to connect an FBM SKU and SBA SKU on Amazon to the same Shopify SKU. So you have to choose which one it will handle, and the sales for the other will not import into Shopify for reporting purposes (FBA) or inventory tracking (for FBM)! After messaging some integrations the only one I found that will handle both being linked up at once is Salestio. There may be others, but CED, Shopify’s own, etc will not do this. So I’m either going to switch to using Salestio for all my Amazon needs, OR I may simply setup the Shopify built in integration to FBM (or FBA) since it’s free, and use the other for only FBA. This could hypothetically keep total fees down. Still figuring this out actually. But it’s something I wish I had known when initially setting things up, so figured I’d throw it out there for future people reading this.

If you have any other questions feel free to ask and I’ll try to answer if I can! Hope some of my hard learned pain and suffering helps ALSO, somebody from Shopify, please make your integration able to handle FBA and FBM at the same time! It is THE common, go to setup for smart sellers… So no reason it shouldn’t handle it since it’s such a common setup.

[lixonic]

Sorry for the necro post, this isn’t a promo, just looking to validate an idea.

I’m jumping in because I saw the exact same struggle on this thread : keeping products split in Shopify, but needing them grouped as variants for Amazon/Walmart. Since I couldn’t find a tool that did this, I built a lightweight CSV utility that lets you upload your Shopify export, select products to merge, and download a grouped parent/child CSV for marketplace uploads.

If you have feedback or want to share more insights on what features would make this perfect for your workflow, let me know, I’m open to developing this further.