eBay parsing app for a Shopify store

App development
Business to Business (B2B)

Team

Senior Full Stack Developer, Mid-Level Full Stack Developer,
Junior Full Stack Developer, Team Lead, Project Manager,
Account Manager
Technologies

ReactJS, eBay APIs, Shopify API,
PHP, Laravel, MySQL
Time

7 weeks

The task

Build an app that would work with large amounts of data, and would allow editing of product details before publishing them.

Results

+49%

total orders
+93%

usability
+64%

performance

About the app

There are certain types of businesses that find goods on eBay and then resell them later in their stores at a higher price. This requires a lot of manual work, from product search to content management to listing updates. So for one of our clients, we developed an app that automated most of these business processes.

The app works in the following way:

Parses products from eBay
Adds them to the app
Allows manual adjustment of product content
Publishes approved products on the Shopify store

We designed, built, programmed, tested and installed the software into our client’s existing Shopify store to import data via a third-party API. Key features of the app are dealing with large amounts of data, automatic parsing of products, and constant synchronization with eBay. To learn more, let’s dive in!

Challenges and solutions

There are already existing apps that integrate eBay with Shopify, but none of them had the functionality our client needed. The standard solutions were simply taking products from eBay and uploading them directly to a Shopify store, without the possibility to edit product descriptions. This feature was essential for our client to build an effective marketing strategy and form an attractive brand, because different products’ photos and descriptions taken from different sources didn’t look good together.

In our case, these parsed products form a list within the app, with the possibility to edit all product attributes from image, title, and description, to tags that are later needed for filtering products. Only after all content management work is done are the products approved by the admin, and automatically uploaded to the Shopify store.

After the products are published on the Shopify store, the app constantly synchronizes with eBay to check their availability. If a product becomes unavailable on eBay, it’s automatically deleted from the Shopify store as well, to prevent the sale of a product that is already impossible to buy.

How you can benefit

Do you also need a custom solution that is nowhere to be found among the already existing apps?
Visit our App development page to see what can be done.

Key features of the app

Certain specific features make the app easy to work with. Among them are:

Price multiplier

The products are published in the Shopify store with the extra charge already added. As the app is dealing with thousands of products, it increases the original price automatically according to a certain formula, which is based on price ranges and can handle different cases.

Unlimited number of products

There are certain limitations on eBay regarding the number of products that can be downloaded. To avoid this limit, we developed a solution that can parse unlimited numbers of products without any software failures.

Content management

We also developed additional functionality that gives access to the app to our client’s team members, who can log into the app and edit products’ information under their name. The app also creates detailed statistics, which allows an admin to review the work of a manager or the whole team, and assign certain tasks to certain team members. With this functionality, the admin can approve edits, delegate tasks, and build the work of the content management department in the most effective way possible.

Large amount of data

Because the app works with a very large amount of data, we built into the app several different algorithms to track the health of the application. Most of the information is logged, so it’s possible to check if everything has been synchronized correctly at any moment needed. For example, if there’s ever a situation when fewer goods than expected have been uploaded from an eBay store, we can quickly find the reason why it happened and determine the best way to fix it.

Also, the “code-test-fix-code-test” method of work and the well-designed architecture of the app allow it to work fast and smoothly.

Enhanced filtering

The app deals with an average of 30,000 products on a regular basis, so the standard Shopify filtering options were not enough to find the required product. We developed enhanced filtering within the app with some product parameters that do not exist in Shopify.

For example:

Seller — eBay store from which the product was taken;
Status — product’s status within the app, such as “approved”, “default”, or “verified”;
User — the manager who edited product details.

These are just some of the unique filtering options, which make it possible to find any product within seconds, regardless of the total number of products in the store.

Summary

Solutions of this kind are great for any drop-shipping store, where business owners sell products that they don’t yet have. This app is built to work with a large amount of data, but the same principles can be applied to work with any store, from international marketplaces to mom-and-pop online stores.

We are happy that due to the solution we built, our client doesn’t need to manually upload or update thousands of product listings on many levels, and constantly delist products that are no longer available.

To see what our clients say about working with us, check out reviews in our Clutch profile.

Recent projects

Happy Lights
- Custom theme development
- Home & Interiors
Madam Glam: The VIP membership app
- App development
- Business to Business (B2B)
Madam Glam: The warehouse integration
- App development
- Business to Business (B2B)