In this article we will give a concrete answer to a very common research among companies that, after an initial experience of eCommerce carried out on eBay, realize that "it works" and therefore the focus shifts to optimizing the work, which has to do with the integration or the integrated introduction of an ERP (billing or complete management program).

eBay offers some options to manage sales and automate the most common activities: Sales Manager Plus, Turbo Lister or File Exchange. These tools, although valid, are not an integral part of company management, as they always force you to carry out a series of activities manually. The leap in quality is represented by the introduction of a management system for ebay, or rather, the ERP that can also communicate with eBay. 

ERP

The functions normally available in a management software are the following:

• Customer master data
• Supplier master data
• Product management
• Passive cycle: orders to suppliers, passive billing, goods arrival registration, payment of invoices received
• Active cycle: orders from customers, accounting registration (sale at the counter, tax receipt, invoice), payment registration, shipment registration
• Print address labels, barcodes
• Warehouse management integrated with various purchase and sale documents
• Sales analysis, cash flows, etc ...
• VAT returns
• Connections with cash registers, touch screens, barcode readers

eBay market management

What ERP normally do not do is to manage sales on the eBay market , which we can summarize in these activities / work phases:

• Apply an HTML template to products suitable to present the product to be sold on the eBay market. Normally, in fact, the listings have a graphic frame and outline information (conditions of sale, contact methods, alternative products, etc ...). Among other things, the management of the template also carries the management of the additional images to the first and in general the image management of the listings
• Perform a multilingual management (or more generally, multidescriptive) 
• Create advertisements to be published on eBay, adding the information requested by eBay to the product information: market or markets on which the advertisement appears (ebay.it, ebay.fr, ebay.de, ebay.co.uk, etc ...), category (s) of the eBay market, category (s) of the eBay store, method of sale (auction or fixed prices), duration of the advertisement and price, shipping conditions, payment conditions, condition of the goods, conditions of guarantee and return, etc ...
• Manage listing activities (publication of listings) when the warehouse conditions allow, modification of the listings (even only of the quantities available), closing of the listings when the products are no longer available for sale, because perhaps they have been sold on other markets (an online shop owned by the company or a traditional shop) 
• Manage the order downloding and the consequent downloading from the warehouse
• Automation of the aforementioned activities according to the fluctuation of stock availability

The integration solution

The solution available today, at the cost of a modest monthly fee, is based on the introduction of a integration platform (bindCommerce) between an ERP and eBay .

Integration with additional management systems / billing programs will be released in the coming months.