Amazon and OsCommerce: Is integration possible and is it required?

[Alex]

Amazon and OsCommerce: Is integration possible and is it required?
Who needs this?

This small article is devoted to those using OsCommerce as their primary engine for online store.
So, people using OsCommerce, do you need an integration solution with Amazon?

Discussion

Let us consider the case: you are selling your stuff through your multi-featured OsCommerce store, but also recently opened an account at Amazon, or are selling things and are satisfied with Amazon services for a long time. Thus, you have your tuned up order process in OsCommerce admin, and got used to it, but you also have now an Amazon seller central, and have to deal with those several (or a lot) orders from Amazon through their own order/products management web service.

At first glance, if you are not an owner of a high traffic store, the order process thing is not bothering you. However, if you are a store owner with at least 50+ orders each day, the separation between two order management systems will cause you a head ache. And, even for a small OsCommerce store, isn't it better to have all orders falling down to your OsCommerce order management system, so you could process them all at once?

Subject

Thus, the subject arises: Amazon and OsCommerce, is integration possible and is it required?

The answer is - yes. The integration of Amazon into OsCommerce is possible. Is it required? Its up to you.
Now, when we accepted the term that Amazon integration is possible, let us think on how to implement this. Not everybody knows that Amazon has the SOAP API for communicating with Amazon servers. The simpler API involving displaying products from Amazon is widely used, however, the API provided for integration of order processing is not a well known thing.
Thus, having an Amazon API for processing orders, posting new products to Amazon, update products availability, ship or cancel the order etc. we could integrate this all into an well know OsCommerce store engine.

What are the results?
Featuring Amazon OsCommerce integration...

As a result, you will have everything considering Amazon in your OsCommerce store engine.
Within a product edit page in admin, you will be able to post newly created product into Amazon catalog, without leaving your OsCommerce admin area. You will also be able to process the quantity available at Amazon, correct the price, description etc. at Amazon catalog. You will even be able to upload a picture of your product into Amazon catalog without leaving your store.
As for the order processing, you will be able to:
get new orders placed via Amazon into your OsCommerce admin area automatically;
process those orders into your usual way. Once the order is shipped or cancelled, the corresponding Amazon order will also be shipped or cancelled and the available quantity of the correspondent product will be updated on Amazon;
if the order placed on your online oscommerce store contains items that exists at your amazon catalog, the available quantity will be updated automatically.

When could I have this solution?

We have already launched the first store using this technique, and we have success.
However, as this was a unique solution, it is not available to everyone.

Thus, we now wish everybody who needs this to have it. We will soon release a downloadable solution, but first we want to gather up as much information as possible.

[jogi]

Hi there,

sounds pretty interesting!
I am interested in testing / using it. Is there any chance to see a working admin backend?
What would it cost and how long would it take to get it running?

Thanks in advance!
Regards
Jogi

[Alex]

Hi there,

sounds pretty interesting!
I am interested in testing / using it. Is there any chance to see a working admin backend?
What would it cost and how long would it take to get it running?

Thanks in advance!
Regards
Jogi

Hello Jogi,

As far as this is rather big project, involves many things and a lot of debug work for each amazon account, the price for this solution is high now. Time of completion depends on the whole process debugging, from 1 week to several weeks. As this module of our own is installed on a few sites only, we do not have a ready-to-go package yet. As we install it to clients, we are doing bugfixes, optimizations, improvements and are preparing a package to purchase. As we will prepare the ready-to-install package, the price will be significantly lower.

Let me know what info you may also need.

Best,
Alex

Advance Team

[guardianms]

I am interested in this for several of my sites.  My sites are a combo between PHP-Nuke and osCommerce.  I would be more than happy to help out with it in any way I can.

Please let me know.

[Alex]

Hello Guardianms,

If you wish to make a purchase of this contribution, you should write directly to our support (e.g. by using a contact us form),
but if you wish to discuss its features etc. you are free to post them here.

Best,
Alex

[Darkzen]

Hi there,

sounds pretty interesting!
I am interested in testing / using it. Is there any chance to see a working admin backend?
What would it cost and how long would it take to get it running?

Thanks in advance!
Regards
Jogi

Hello Jogi,

As far as this is rather big project, involves many things and a lot of debug work for each amazon account, the price for this solution is high now. Time of completion depends on the whole process debugging, from 1 week to several weeks. As this module of our own is installed on a few sites only, we do not have a ready-to-go package yet. As we install it to clients, we are doing bugfixes, optimizations, improvements and are preparing a package to purchase. As we will prepare the ready-to-install package, the price will be significantly lower.

Let me know what info you may also need.

Best,
Alex

Advance Team

Hello Alex, I come to news.

You advanced on the creation of one " ready-to-instal package " (Module)

If it is case, you can give us his price

thx

[elite]

I'm curious if this would be a 2 way street. Would you be able to upload your products from OSCommerce to amazon so as not to have to recreate all the products. Or simply import from amazon to OSC.

Sincerely,
Extremely Interested Customer

Please contact me at eliteink@gmail.com with pricing info.

[Alex]

Hello Eliteink,

Initially, this was not developed as people has much products in their stores.. and Amazon is sometimes "angry" and could even block
the SOAP interface for clients which post too much information in a one time piece. But, I think this could be resolved by e.g. a
cron job which is posting a bunch of products every 30 minutes.

This, however, requires development of a separate cron module. Besides, product xmls should be posted in a special order: first should be product xmls, and they should be processed OK, and only then inventory, image etc. xml files.

Best,
Alex

[johnyx2]

I would like information about the Amazon osCommerce integration, price, features. I tried the contact us form, but the security code does not show, so could not use the form.
Please let me know how to get this information

Thanks

[Alex]

Hello there,

Thanks for letting us know about the contact us form, its been fixed.
As for the Amazon solution for osc, it is in development now. It will be a large contribution with a lot of features, totally integrated in
OsCommerce, and theoretically you will be able not to use the amazon seller central for most of actions required to sell products at amazon.

So, we expect a downloadable ready-to-go contribution to be available approximately in 1 month from now. As amazon catalog is very
large (the one who worked with different product types should know) we are trying to get everything ready to use in our contribution.

In the meanwhile, please post your comments and suggestions here:

-  How do you want the system to look like?
-  What extra features/functionality you might need?
-  What suggestions to improve the system do you have?
-  What shipping/labels/add-ons you might ever wish to use within the system?

As we gather all this information, we will try to include all requests into the system being developed now.

Thanks for your questions,
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