Selling on Amazon and other marketplaces from Shopify

Shopify as the hub, marketplaces as channels

The idea is simple: Shopify is the source of truth for products, prices and inventory, and the marketplaces receive that information. Orders placed on Amazon or eBay flow back into Shopify, deduct stock and are fulfilled from the same admin as your store orders.

Shopify doesn't have an Amazon connection built into the admin. The integration is done with apps, and the main one is Marketplace Connect, Shopify's own app (formerly Codisto) that connects your catalog with several marketplaces. There are also third-party apps and feed tools that cover other European marketplaces.

Marketplace Connect: what it does and which marketplaces

According to Shopify's help center, Marketplace Connect lets you list products and manage Amazon and eBay orders and inventory from Shopify, plus Walmart and Target Plus, which are only available in the United States. Etsy no longer accepts new connections from the app. Product and order changes sync automatically, and the app converts prices into each marketplace's currency.

The app is free to install and, according to its Shopify App Store listing, includes a number of synced orders per month at no cost and charges a small percentage per order beyond that, with a monthly cap. Check the listing before deciding, because those terms can change. The interface is available in Spanish.

• List products from your Shopify catalog
• Two-way stock sync
• Marketplace orders inside the Shopify admin
• Currency conversion for prices
• Pricing rules per marketplace

What you need before connecting Amazon

You need an active, verified Amazon Seller Central account on the appropriate selling plan. The app doesn't replace that registration or your obligations to Amazon: category policies, shipping times, performance metrics and approvals for some categories and brands.

The part that takes the most work is product matching. If your items already exist on Amazon, each Shopify product is linked to the existing listing through its EAN or GTIN. If they are your own-brand products, you'll create new listings and have to fill in the attributes Amazon requires for each category. Having barcodes filled in on your Shopify variants and attributes stored in metafields saves many hours.

Price, stock and shipping: the key decisions

Amazon's fees are different from your store's costs, so many brands set a different price per marketplace. Connector apps support rules like adding a percentage or rounding, without touching your store price. Also consider whether it makes sense to list the entire catalog or only the products with the best margin.

For stock, decide whether you share all your inventory or reserve units for your own store. If you use Fulfillment by Amazon (FBA), the stock physically sits in Amazon's warehouses and has to be treated as a separate location. If you ship yourself (FBM), your shipping operation must meet the marketplace's required times, which are usually stricter than your store's.

Other marketplaces and feed tools

For marketplaces that Marketplace Connect doesn't cover, such as some European fashion, electronics or department store marketplaces, there are third-party apps and feed integrators that read your Shopify catalog and adapt it to each destination. Before choosing, check their documentation for exactly what they sync: sending products only is very different from managing stock, orders, returns and tracking in both directions.

Every integration you add is one more piece to maintain. If a marketplace brings you few sales, sometimes it pays more to close it than to keep an extra app and an extra workflow running.

Preparing your Shopify catalog for multiple channels

The better structured your Shopify catalog is, the less work each marketplace takes. Marketplaces ask for attributes your store sometimes doesn't display: material, composition, dimensions, weight, country of origin or compatibility. If that data lives in product and variant metafields, connector apps can read it and map it to each marketplace's fields instead of you filling them in one by one.

Review your variants too. Shopify supports up to 3 options per product and each marketplace has its own way of grouping sizes and colors, so option names should be consistent across the whole catalog (always Size and Color, never Size on some products and Dimensions on others). Images must meet each destination's requirements: on Amazon, for example, the main image has to be on a white background.

Finally, think about orders. Decide which inventory location fulfills marketplace orders, how they are tagged so you can tell them apart in the admin, and who on the team handles each channel's own issues, such as customer messages on Amazon or claims on eBay, which never reach the Shopify inbox.

Common mistakes

Connecting the entire catalog without reviewing margins and discovering that some products lose money after fees and shipping. Launching without EAN codes and ending up with duplicate listings or listings linked to the wrong product. Keeping a second inventory tool that also writes stock, which leads to overselling. And not reviewing invoicing: taxes and invoices for marketplace orders have their own particularities, so check with your tax advisor.