Listen to this articleCodisto Connect allows Magento sellers to list their entire product catalog on eBay in minutes. Codisto has developed marketplace integration software that defines “next generation” and is rightly disrupting a stagnant multi-channel marketplace. Below is our interview with Jonathan Pollard, CEO of Codisto:
Q: What is your startup story?
A: Codisto is a tech startup based in Sydney, Australia. Entirely self-funded, the company has developed marketplace integration software that defines “next generation” and is rightly disrupting a stagnant multi-channel marketplace.
Codisto began as a boutique consulting business offering custom ecommerce services. The company quickly gained a reputation for its eBay integration abilities, with clients being referred by eBay Australia. After incredible feedback from several high profile eBay integration projects, including Kogan, Australia’s largest pure online retailer, it was clear we had something special and should make it more widely available. We stopped offering custom integrations and focused on productizing our solution.
Codisto Connect, our eBay integration extension for Magento was launched in May 2015 and has been embraced by the Magento community in Australia. The international launch on 30 September 2015 at the eCommerce Expo in London, will see the product made available for all 23 eBay marketplaces around the world.
Q: Codisto Connect is a next generation alternative to M2Epro. What’s the best thing about Codisto Connect that people should know?
A: Users see a quantum leap difference in terms of speed and ease of set up and use. Codisto Connect allows the eBay sales channel to be added to Magento, fully integrated, and the entire product catalog listed and maintained on eBay, in seconds. It is so easy to do, online sellers can do it themselves without the need for consultants to install and maintain it.
The concept of multi-channel integration is not new. But M2Epro is too hard to set up and difficult to use. It is also heavy on the Magento environment. Codisto’s user experience, approach to software architecture, speed of set up and ease of use make it disruptive and compelling. It means Codisto Connect is solving a very profound ecommerce problem:
The whole ecommerce ecosystem is currently being throttled by the absence of a widely distributed solution that makes multi-channel selling quick and easy. Codisto Connect removes the barriers to multi-channel selling and allows ecommerce sales to increase and flow through the whole ecosystem. Adjacent technologies and services such as payment solutions, accounting solutions, fulfillment solution, design services and many more across the industry all benefit from the increased revenue flow.
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Q: Can you explain what makes Codisto Connect truly ‘next generation’ and how it differs from your competition?
A: Codisto Connect provides the fastest time to first listings and first sale on eBay. Merchants can install and list their entire product catalog on eBay, regardless of size, including product variants, in just 4 clicks.
Our solution is unique in that it automatically selects the most appropriate eBay category for the product to be listed in – there is no need to select manually. We use a combination of eBay APIs and machine learning to achieve this. We’ve known some M2Epro implementations take 8 weeks for 50,000 products and cost thousands of dollars. Using Codisto Connect it takes less than a minute.
Codisto Connect comes with a professionally designed eBay sales template built-in. It is fully editable in HTML for personal branding, but merchants can achieve professional looking listings immediately ‘out of the box’ without the need to rely on Times New Roman font.
The quality of the user interface in Codisto Connect immediately grabs attention. ‘XpressGrid’ is just like a spreadsheet making it very intuitive. Clever infinite scrolling techniques have been employed to avoid using page numbers or scrolling delays from heavy processing of large catalogs. Common eBay operations such as price uplifts, shipping options, return policies, eBay titles and descriptions and template options are all available by simply searching and filtering via XpressGrid Multi-Edit.
Synchronizing with eBay is server processor intensive due to calculating what has changed on Magento or eBay and calculating & sending the appropriate messages across potentially thousands of products. Codisto Connect keeps all that processing outside Magento – this means the plugin/extension is very lightweight. This has several benefits:
1) We sync in real-time, meaning inventory is always up to date.
2) Magento performance (customer browsing speed) isn’t adversely affected during sync.
3) There is less chance of conflict within Magento or other plugins – the less that’s in the plugin, the less there is to go wrong.
As a comparison, M2Epro uses a scheduler called Magento Cron – the only way to keep the inventory more up to date is to schedule the cron more frequently which in turn affects Magento performance more frequently.
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Q: How does the price of Codisto Connect compare to other solutions?
A: Codisto Connect has a small monthly subscription price that depends on the number of listings. From a ‘sticker price’ point of view, M2Epro is ‘free’ because it is currently subsidized by eBay. However, from a Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) point of view Codisto Connect is cheaper. This is because M2Epro’s TCO is adversely affected by:
1) Lengthy set up time, paying consultants to install and delays in selling products on eBay.
2) Paying for improved hosting to offset Magento performance problems or accepting slow browsing experiences for customers and suffering abandoned sales.
3) Greater chance of Magento conflicts that require consultants to fix notwithstanding the lost sales from broken systems.
These factors make the TCO of M2Epro higher than Codisto Connect. In comparing to other solutions we find they suffer similar problems to M2Epro but also charge merchants directly for the solution either in terms of upfront consulting costs and/or ongoing fees. This again means the TCO of Codisto Connect is cheaper.
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Q: Do you have any new features in the pipeline? What are your plans?
A: Most competitors offer a broad base of integration solutions “for all platforms with all online marketplaces”. But peel back the marketing and the actual solutions are usually very underwhelming.
Codisto has purposefully kept very focused, currently only offering eBay integration for Magento. This has allowed us to go very deep with the solution to offer a true next generation experience.
Very soon we will be launching a spreadsheet eBay integration product called ‘Codisto Go’ that will allow users around the world to create up to 10,000 listings for free, one-time. It uses the same core technology as Codisto Connect and comes with the unique XpressGrid interface that has made Connect so successful. Ongoing management and creating additional listings costs US$19/month.
We have also started work on ‘Codisto Enterprise’ our API eBay integration solution. We expect this to be launched later in the year.
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