Hello RMS Community,
I recently started using KOSMOS' eBay application that pulls in completed eBay sales into RMS. Here is how it works.
-The application works from the back-end of the X-Cart admin area.
-You tell the application that you would like to look for new sales. it checks eBay for PAID, completed auctions, buy-it-now, or store transactions and the "orders" are imported into X-Cart like they are website orders.
-The next time my NEWEST WEB INTEGRATOR application checks the web for new sales (according to my schedule), it pulls the eBay sales into RMS just like a web sale.
-New customer records are made, the shipping is picked at the time of import (because eBay has a weird shipping function). This is OK by me since most of my auctions are FLAT RATE SHIPPING where the customer does not get to choose which type of shipping. They just pay a flat fee.
-I save the imported web order as a WORK ORDER.
-We pack, ship with SHIPRUSH (integrated into RMS), change the WO into an invoice. DONE.
PROS:
*This application has saved us HOURS and HOURS of manual data entry for eBay orders. *The order uses the ILC from our eBay item details (every one of our auctions has the ILC of that item in the custom label field.) to bring the item into the POS screen with the price from eBAY. *Customer names and addresses BAM. no data entry. *The eBay transaction ID comes over into the invoice details field. *Transactions are only brought over from eBay once. No duplications. *It just WORKS.CONS or improvements needed:
- More automation in the future would be handy to eliminate the manual pulling of completed transactions from eBay. Some sort of polling would be a nice upgrade.
- The eBay Customer 'EBAY USERNAME' cannot be pulled into the customer record because there is no field to put it in. This seems to be a NEW WEST INTEGRATOR issue. They only have certain places were data from the web can go into the RMS record. So, the extra fields in RMS Customer record cannot be utilized for this info as we had done in the past. We have worked-around this issue by just using the customer's email address for eBay querying.
- If the ITEM that was won on eBay has been "inactivated" in RMS, the order cannot be imported. It only tries once. If it doesn't come in, that's it. You have to log into eBay and manually enter that order.
- SPECIAL CHARACTERS that eBay allows get honked up when imported into RMS. This is a problem for some International customer's names and addresses. I do not believe this is the APPS fault but may be a NEW WEST or RMS issue.
A BIG thanks to KOSMOS (Alex) and Walter for the great job they did getting this app up and running and working out the kinks.
Anyone who does a lot of eBay orders and uses RMS, it would be worth it to switch to X-Cart just to get this application.
Feel free to contact me for any additional info.
Mickie Dale Hollow Outdoors Formerly mickie's Place Outdoor gear