Exporting Product Inventory From Bonanza.com to EBlueJay.com
This week I am trying out EblueJay.com's bulk product upload tool and Bonanza.com's bulk exporter tool for the first time.
Someone once asked SellerThink to do a video showing how to do a bulk upload from eBay to Ebluejay. A week earlier EblueJay had just dumped their auto import from eBay function and changed to .CVS files.
SellerThink was a much smaller channel at the time on YouTube, so I felt obligated to at least mention it in a video response. I ended up making a pretty lame YouTube video that just pointed to EBlueJay's help page.
It's now several years later, and I have restarted my store on EBlueJay after taking a break in 2017. EBlueJay at the time had difficulty sending email messages at that time, especially to Gmail. Instead of coming out properly formatted, it came out in html text. As busy as I am, it became to much of a hassle to have to log-in everytime any kind of message was emailed, just to see what it was regarding.
This week I actually have some down time from both YouTube and my marketplaces so I decided I would cross post all of my products from Mercari to EBlueJay, but that is a bit of a challenge since its a fully manual process.
I knew EBlueJay has an import function to all Bulk Imports from Amazon, Etsy and CVS spreadsheet files, even though it no longer supports direct import from EBay.
I also recalled that Bonanza.com has the ability to export products from a store to CVS file, and since all of my eBay products get automatically imported to my Bonanza store, and I already had over 95 products listed for sale, why not find out how difficult it would be to export from Bonanza and import to EBlueJay.
So tonight I decided to actually give it a shot. First I needed some products to import and I currently already have most of the my eBay products on EBlueJay. So I needed to be able to import unique products that were not on eBay or EBlueJay.com and I needed to be able to Export the products from another marketplace. Bonanza fit the bill.
By being unique products, I do not have to worry about accidentally importing and ending up with a bunch of duplicates products that I already have for sale on eBluejay.
After all, the idea of being able to import a .CVS file is to save lots of repetitive work.
Of course the easiest solution I can think of when it comes to creating inventory and cross posting is an android app called ClassAdLister,
I hadn't used ClassAdLister with my Bonanza products since Bonanza was supported last time I checked. Many marketplaces are supported by ClassAdLister including etsy, EBluejay, Ecrater, Amazon and even Mercari, that really wasn't the point of the experiment anyway.
I decided to video record the entire process, though I am not going to upload the whole video even after its edited, no one will watch it otherwise. I video recorded it while actually trying it out for the first time; I had to redo a few things a couple of times because i wasn't totally sure what I was doing, to be honest. I had never successfully exported and imported anything before, mainly because I tend to be one of those people who create the manuals rather than read the manuals. There are times in life when actually reading the manual is necessary, or in this case, watching the video I'll put together once it's ready.
In many ways both EBlueJay and Bonanza marketplaces actually complement each other. Both eBlueJay and Bonanza allow importing CVS files, that means someone could simply sell on eBay, have Bonanza automatically import them from eBay to Bonanza.com, and then manually export them to a CVS file from Bonanza and prep them for upload to EBlueJay. A reseller could also export a CVS file directly from eBay and modify the CVS fields just like you would do for Bonanza.
Both EBlueJay and Bonanza are available to non-US sellers, so world shipping import is available.
Another similarity between the two is they both provide the seller with a store, large product inventories, well developed marketplaces, no listing fees, etc. That being said, to actually make money on these marketplaces it helps to already have an established following of customers or the ability to bring your own customers, since actual marketplace shopping traffic can be slow.
On EBlueJay I have had 9 successful sales since I started and on Bonanza 11 successful sales. I am not complaining at all, the sales have been actually quite nice as far as profit margin goes. But, that is pretty slow and small considering I've been on both marketplaces since at least 2015.
Exporting from Bonanza was straight forward, you just follow their directions and click the export button. A while later, they email you a notification to go back to the export page where you can then download the prepared CVS file.
You'll need a software like Microsoft Excel or the free OpenOffice Spreadsheet or even Google Spreadsheet to be able to open and modify the CVS file.
Fortunately, EBlueJay provides some sample CVS templates. Personally, I downloaded and used the "Typical CVS Sample". This has the most common headings needed for the columns. I copied the headings from this CVS spreadsheet and replaced the ones that matched the content on Bonana's CVS exported spreadsheet.
Once you have downloaded and saved the file to your computer, you'll want to go to EBlueJay's Help Section at the bottom of their marketplace page. The Help Section has information on all the heading fields that EBlueJay can read. These will replace the similar heading fields that Bonanza exports. It's just a matter of copy and paste, and though I can not go into all the steps here in the SellerThink article, I'll be uploading a video eventually to the SellerThink YouTube Channel or SellerThink S'Mores YouTube Channel. (I'll also post it here in the article in an update later)
You will simply replace some of the titles, delete a couple of obsolete columns that Bonanza exports, add a new couple of new columns that EBlueJay needs and then manually add some details like product conditions and category id numbers. EBlueJay's product category id numbers probably took the most time, since I had to go through it's giant list of product types to insert into the Bonanza Exported Spreadsheet file.
For instance, if the product was a NonFiction Book, you would go to EBlueJay's page of Categories in the help section for importing products, and look in the list for books. Clicking "Books" will take you all of the different book types. NonFiction Books, Fiction Books, Children's Books, etc. (These are not the actual categories, just examples)
Then you would simply copy the product category number on the far right side of the page, return to your spreadsheet and paste it into the product's category column for the correct product. It sounds a lot more complicated that it it. It's honestly pretty easy, a little time consuming, but compared to creating 100 new products from scratch individually, you'll be saving many, many, many hours.
I was doing it for the first time, video recording it, and making sure I showed what I was doing, which is already a slow process because of the video recording part. But altogether, it took about a half hour. Manually entering products one by one, I can only do about five new product listings. By bulk uploading, I did 100 in a half hour.
Someone a little more geeky and spreadsheet brilliant could easily set up some kind of merge function that would do all the manual work or at least most of it, but it's not a function I am familiar enough with.
Out of the ninety-five plus products I imported from Bonanza into EBlueJay, only three products had errors. Those errors were products that had "Calculated Shipping" and needed a couple of extra details on the spreadsheet that I didn't include. I think in a future export/import or update, I'd just make all of the shipping flat rate and go in and manually update the shipping on those products.
What's next? Well, it takes over night according to EBlueJay.com for it to process the bulk upload into my actual store. I decided to put my entire store on vacation temporarily during this part of the process, since I do not know if all the products will upload active or on-hold. I imagine they will upload as on-hold, since that would make more sense. Either way, since this is my first import to EBlueJay, I'll side with caution and just temporarily close the store until all the products are imported and I know what other steps I need to take next.
This article is currently just part-one. I'll be updating after I see what happens next, and then again once I have the video edited. I really want to know what I am talking about when sharing with other resellers about how something works, it's true for all of the SellerThink videos, and it's true here on the SellerThink website also.
You may be wondering about the Bonanza images and how that is handled. Well, when Bonanza creates an export of your products, it also creates an Image URL. EBlueJay also imports Image URL's. Since I am still waiting for my import to process, I currently do not know if the actual photos will be imported via the URL image of the product from Bonanza by EBlueJay.
Either way, I imagine that even if it does import any images based on the URL, that only the main photo from Bonanza will be imported, which means I will need to manually upload the additional photos. That's still not a big concern, considering the amount of time altogether that will be saved by doing a bulk import into EBlueJay.
Update 2
After waiting 24 hours to see if the products originally uploaded in the CVS file were uploaded, they hadn't. So I returned to the page where I had originally uploaded the Bonanza.com export and then to the help section for bulk imports and discovered in small text, that when an error occurs of any kind, the entire process is voided.I had suspected as much, but wasn't sure. Now I am. As mentioned previously, I had thought that the three errors for calculated shipping could create a problem, I had also decided that the easiest solution, especially since I anticipate that I will have to do some editing to each uploaded product anyway, that it would be best to simply change the Calculated Shipping to Fixed Rate Shipping.
To do this, I cleared out all of the weights and size shipping columns, changed the Calculated to Fixed Rate by copying and pasting and finally added a $15.00 shipping price for these items.
One reason I had wanted to keep the calculated shipping is because these were heavy products. $15.00 I decided should cover their shipping cost whether I shipped them US Priority or FedEx Ground. The goal after all was simply to get the products uploaded and to have shipping at a price range that would protect the sale, just in the rare case the products were to go live instead of on hold once EBlueJay processes them.
The modified CVS file uploaded without errors and was marked as NEW on the bulk upload page.
In the next update, I'll post comments and probably an image or two of the results following EBlueJay processing the CVS file.
Final Update and Thoughts About EBlueJay.com's CVS Importing Feature
I have to admit I am very impressed with EBlueJay's import feature, so I will share a few thoughts and impressions about it.
First, I was a little surprised and a bit disappointed that all of the products uploaded as active and for-sale as opposed to being on hold and ready to review prior to taking them live for-sale.
This was disappointing, because it would seem to make more sense to have the products reviewable before making them available for sale. A seller might want to make some adjustments to prices, or in my case, I ended up making three products flat-rate shipping instead of calculated shipping in order to make it easier to upload the file without having to spend additional time figuring out the missing extra shipping information needed to remove the errors I encountered the first time.
So I'd want to be able to go in and edit those flat-rates that I set as $15.00 shipping. I may want to make them calculated shipping again now that the shipping weights can be easily edited within the actual store.
I can think of quite a few other reasons why it would be better for an entire inventory to upload as pending, one instance would be in my store for example. I already had some products cross-listed on EBlueJay before I did the import, with almost 100 products being imported, I didn't go through the CVS file looking for products that might already be in my store. Those products will need to be fixed and with the version I originally manually created in my store deleted or the new imported version which is a duplicate deleted.
I was impressed with how well all of the imported information formatted nicely in the description box and even the UPC correctly appears in the right place.
Especially impressive is the actual photo import. I had assumed and guessed above, that only the main image might import. I had also thought that maybe none of the photos would actually import at all, but instead every single photo was imported from Bonanza into each imported products listing.
That alone saves hours and hours that would be otherwise required to download the photos from the marketplace I exported from or going through my external hard drive, locating the edited versions of the photos, then uploading them one by one into each product.
A real time saver!
All of the imported new products are listed in the default category called "Others". That could of been dealt with in the CVS file before importing if I had wanted to spend the extra time going through each line of product information and adding a Custom Store Category ID to tell it in which of the custom categories I created for my store to put it in, but I figured it would be easier to just do that in the Inventory Manager within my store.
I am assuming this is true about being able to define the custom store category, since I was able to accurately define which EBlueJay search category each product goes into, via the CVS file.
One thing I thought was strange is that despite having added the UPC, Brand and Part Number for the majority of the Bonanza.com imported products; EBlueJay shows them as Custom.
What that means is that the products by default will not be added by EBlueJay to the Google Shopping Cart until that Custom Checkbox is deselected so that the UPC code, brand and part number become active, or additional details are added to define the Google Attributes. Now, it is possible this too could be tweaked or added to the CVS file to uncheck the box, but I'm not positive. Either way, it is just another reason to support the idea of the products being uploaded as pending products for sale, instead of active products for sale.
Since "Tag" are unique to EBlueJay to assist in its marketplace and other search engines results, you will need to go in and edit/add any tags or keywords you want associated with the product, manually.
Conclusion!
EBlueJay's import feature is ultimately quite impressive despite the minor critiques I have made above.
Considering you can use it to create your own CVS files for your products manually offline and then upload them all at once (other than the overnight processing time) you can save a ton of time.
I am also impressed with how easily I was able to export my entire store off of Bonanza.com as a CVS file, make a few tweaks that took me about thirty minutes, and then upload them all to EBlueJay including all of the photos from Bonanza being imported.
With EBlueJay's beefy 52,000 products able to be imported with a single CVS file, that puts a lot of power into the hands of small businesses who want to expand and operate their online store on EBlueJay for nothing other than it's one time sign-up fee to sell. When I signed up, it was $5.00 because I was an early adopter and previously used its retired BluJay Marketplace. At the time of this article the one time sign up fee is only $10 US Dollars. There are no other fees.
Not every reseller or small business requires shopping traffic from the marketplace. Not every reseller or small business needs an eBay store or to sell on Amazon or Bonanza or even Mercari. Selling on such kinds of Shopping Mall Marketplaces where you have a plethora of sellers competing against your product and prices creates very aggressive fluctuations in selling prices. If your product is unique, specialized to your retail store, and you can bring your own customers, then EBlueJay should be top at your list.
The closest comparisons in many ways would be Storenvy where you have a fully customizable store, but your customers get charged a store fee at check out above you shipping and product cost by Storenvy, in addition to the 10% sellers pay on both the product and shipping. Storenvy can be a good store if you need something fully customizable but are not ready to commit to a monthly store rental with the much more popular Shopify or Bigcommerce.
EBlueJay in that regards would probably come if under Storenvy in the line up of storefronts. EBlueJay is not as customizable by any means, but generally speaking, many small businesses and retailers expanding from their brick and mortar shop generally do not need a full pledge private customizable marketplace. I've seen and known lots of small businesses who have wasted tons of money, energy and time jumping into a custom store and only having twenty-five to fifty products listed. The vision is real, but you don't act on the dream until your already making the money to fund it.
With EBlueJay, there are no fees. They have three built-in payment options; PayPal, Stripe and Amazon Payments. Bonanza used to have Amazon Payments in addition to PayPal, but not to long ago, they completely dropped Amazon. That puts EBlueJay in an entirely step above both Bonanza.com and Storenvy which only offers PayPal and Stripe.
Final thought; despite slow sales traffic through the actual marketplace, EBlueJay is a top recommendation for sellers whose needs can be addressed by it. I personally have had pretty close to the same amount of sales on EBlueJay as I have on Bonanza.com. Since you can export from Bonanza and import to EBlueJay, you might as well sell on both. There are a few sellers on EBlueJay that do very, very well. My niche store generally needs a more active shopping traffic.
SellerThink has quite a few video reviews and How To Videos available on YouTube. These can be useful to help you decide if it will work for your situation, help you learn how a few features work and give you more information than I am able to deliver here on the SellerThink website.
Find those videos in this EBlueJay YouTube Playlist.