inkFrog headquartered in Phoenix provides auction management and ecommerce listing software for vendors selling through major ecommerce platforms (e.g. Amazon, eBay, etc.).
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Adobe Commerce (Magento Commerce)
Score 8.0 out of 10
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Adobe Commerce (Magento Commerce) provides companies with a platform to manage, personalize, and optimize the commerce experience across every touch point and across the customer journey. ACC is built on Magento Commerce Pro and is integrated with Adobe Experience Manager. It was originally developed as an open-source eCommerce content management solution by Varien, Inc. Varien was acquired by eBay in…
Inkfrog is a useful upload tool for adding stock from your website to eBay and now also to Amazon, although we don't sell via the latter and we only list to eBay UK. I think it works better as an upload tool than an all-in-one eBay shop management tool and some tasks are easier to do directly on eBay itself. eBay also offers insights - such as offering trending prices - that Inkfrog doesn't. However it is useful in terms of being able to bulk adjust item pricing to include the cost of eBay selling fees. Inkfrog is probably ideal if you have a recognisable product to sell - with our offering it struggles with mapping shop categories (we use lots of sub and sub-sub-categories). Certain listing capabilities cannot be reproduced, such as quantity discounts, and I've never got to grips with mapping products with options and variations, so a lot is left out of our full inventory. Ultimately you will still need to find some time in your day to manage your eBay store - Inkfrog is not 100% reliable sometimes. Inkfrog will also take some of your time and a lot of patience, but ultimately is a huge timesaver for uploading products so it is worthwhile.
Ultimately, if a company is looking for a solid industry-known E-Commerce system, Magento Commerce does exactly what it's intended to do. The headaches start when your company wants to start getting granular in customizations of the platform to meet specific business needs (which every company eventually has). This becomes a major issue down the road when trying to upgrade said customizations as the core software updates.
inkFrog handles product variants really well. Their platform pulls the SKUs and information directly from BigCommerce and then lets me easily customize each variant with different pictures which is really helpful.
It also makes adding multiple listings very easy. Since it imports the item specifics and description directly from BigCommerce I don't have to go through each listing one by one and I can just bulk upload our products onto eBay.
inkFrog also lets me set different templates for shipping, or profiles from different items and then I can apply those in bulk to items which saves a huge amount of time since I don't have to go through every item and change specifics.
Magento Commerce Cloud allows us to develop our own custom solutions for problems that we need solved.
Magento Commerce Cloud can also be integrated with many of the third part vendors that we use. This has made many implementations go very smoothly and tends to be much quicker than developing our own custom solution.
There are many features available right out of the box. Many of them we have not implemented yet, but it is great to have them available to us when we are ready.
The pre-built themes are really bad. Thankfully we don't have to use them and created our own.
The other issue regarding these themes is that they are locked behind a paywall and are a premium feature; subpar themes should not be charged to consumers.
InkFrog also connects with other marketplaces that we also sell on, such as Amazon. Unfortunately, it does not work as well with other marketplaces as it does with eBay, which is a shame since we would prefer to have it all in one place.
The platform is difficult to tune and can be slow. Even with expensive best in class hardware the platform performance can be an issue. Even with caching poor coding can lead to unacceptable performance and user experiences.
The total cost of ownership for the platform can be quite high as a great deal of technical expertise is required to modify, develop, troubleshoot and maintain the platform. The costs of initial development are only a down payment on what a Magento store will cost. For mid size companies with substantial web revenues this can be overcome for smaller businesses the total cost of ownership may be prohibitive.
Security of the platform can be an issue. Magento is often targeted by hackers and much of the security is the responsibility of the store owner.
Magento is well-supported by a big development team at eBay, which not only addresses bug reports very quickly, but also is constantly working on improvements to the platform. The wealth of Magento third party modules ensures that the platform will be up to date with future changes to Payment or ERP systems. Security is always a concern and with the Zend framework as a foundation, Magento has had very few security-related patches since I have started to work with it
Magento offers lots of templates and themes to customize the look and feel of the store, and even optimize it for mobile phones. The have an extensive library of forms and templates.
We looked at Sellbrite. We really liked Sellbrite in view of its glowing reviews and integration with Etsy. However we didn't fully trial the program so I am not able to comment here more than to say that Inkfrog is by far the most economical option. We currently pay around $10 per month, whereas Sellbrite is nearly $50.
Magento scales much better than any of the other software when it comes to very large e-commerce websites. But all the other options are more user-friendly for smaller sites as there is a bit of a learning curve in learning to manage Magento. Customization is better along with WooCommerce and OpenCart as self-hosted solutions vs. BigCommerce and Shopify which are hosted. Magento should be the first choice for large, extensive e-commerce solutions,but for smaller stores, I would recommend the others first.
Overall inkFrog has had a positive impact. It has really freed up huge amounts of time that would be normally spent manually managing eBay listings one by one.
It also has had a very positive impact by using the inventory management which again frees up huge amounts of time since I don't have to go through and manually manage all of our listings. We also do not oversell items anymore which is a giant plus.
inkFrog's template customization has also really really helped by making our listings much more aesthetically pleasing and more professional looking which builds a lot of trust with our eBay customers.
Magento definitely lets us get a return on our investment. Because we have developers who can customize Magento to our needs, we have been able to create a beautiful and effective website, run promotions, and serve up customized product display pages that are effective and beautifully branded.
Magento has also caused a lot of time to be invested in doing something that seems simple, but without a lot of knowledge, end up taking far more time than could otherwise be better-spent.
We have had to outsource some of our development work due to Magento being developer-focused rather than marketer/merchandiser-focused. I've used other website management software that is comparable to Magento's capabilities but is far easier to use, that even someone like me (with basic HTML/CSS skills) can customize the front-end without requiring a back-end developer to intervene.
