How to link existing products on Amazon and eBay

As its name suggests, WP-Lister is a tool to list products from WordPress on eBay and Amazon and keep the inventory in sync. It is primarily designed to work with existing WooCommerce products, but there are options to import existing Amazon and eBay listings as well.

If you currently have your products listed on eBay and Amazon, there are certain steps you need to follow to link these listings and their inventory. This is achieved by connecting each listing to the same WooCommerce product - and it is very important that all your products and variations have the same SKU on both eBay and Amazon. 

Since some details like variation attributes can no be changed for certain eBay listings, the first import should be done from eBay. If you would import from Amazon first, you might not be able to revise certain eBay listings due to their restrictions. 

Overview

Follow these steps on a clean WooCommerce site to import all your products from eBay and Amazon:

1. Import all products and categories from eBay
2. Add missing SKUs for all products and variations
3. Check if your SKUs match the SKUs on Amazon
4. Request a new Merchant Inventory Report
5. Process the report and import your Amazon listings

If all your products exist on both sites and all your SKUs match, the last step will not create any new WooCommerce products but link the existing products to your Amazon listings instead.

Step 1: Import from eBay

This requires the eBay importer add-on which is explained  here.

Step 2: Add missing SKUs

Visit Amazon -> Tools -> SKU Generator and click on Missing SKU. If there are any products or variations shown, you either need to add SKUs manually by editing the product, or you can use the SKU Generator tool which will be explained in a separate article soon.

Step 3: Check your SKUs

Before you continue with the next step, you should check at least a subset of your products to make sure the same product does indeed use the same SKU on WooCommerce and Amazon.

Step 4: Request an inventory report

Visit Amazon -> Import and click the button Request inventory report. This can take Amazon up to half an hour to generate.

Step 5: Run the import to connect your listings

Once the report has been generated, click on Process to see a preview of what is going to happen when you process the report. Check the number of products to be imported and the number of products to be updated. If all your Amazon products are active on eBay as well, there should only be products to be updated.

If everything looks all right, start the import - which is a two step process of first processing the report, followed by creating missing products in WooCommerce. For more details please see the article  Import products from Amazon.

Removing all imported products

You can start from scratch by deleting all imported products. Both the eBay importer plugin and WP-Lister for Amazon (0.9.5.10) allow you to remove all imported products an listings from eBay -> Import -> Tools and Amazon -> Tools -> Developer. 

Please note: You can not just remove all imported eBay products and import from eBay again - neither to the same for Amazon. When you remove all imported products, you need to do so in both plugins and then import both from eBay and Amazon again. If you only do it in one plugin, you will break the connection between product and listing for the other one!

You should also keep in mind that when you remove and re-import all your products this way, any existing data like orders placed on eBay will be "disconnected" from the actual product. Your previously imported eBay and Amazon orders will not link to the purchased product anymore, and they won't show product thumbnail nor SKU on the order detail page.