Hey Alison,

Welcome to the forums, it’s great to have you here, let’s see if we can shed some light on your questions :)

I don’t really want a Magento website as I am close to completing a Shopify one and too much work and costs have been involved. I realise I will have to purchase the hosting for the Magento site but do I have to use it or could I just have a small sister site selling one area of haircare and have a link from it to my main website?

The answer to this is no, you don’t need to use Magento as a website at all, you can just use it as a stock and order management system for your marketplaces. The downside is it won’t be able to sync the stock with what’s on Shopify but will manage eBay and Amazon. If it was me I would get Magento working with the marketplaces first and get your Shopify store complete, and then down the line if you decide to run a sister store using your Magento system then you can do that then if you decide to do so.

Can I syncronise Ebay & Amazon with M2e without it affecting Linnworks at first? I need to be able to continue to use Linnworks while I look into this and don’t want to disfunction linnworks in any way.

Yes you can add your marketplace accounts to M2E Pro, we just need to go a little careful on the settings. What we don’t want is any duplication with the two systems as that’s when things can really get messed up. So you would turn off inventory synchornisation in M2E until you were happy that the switch was viable. Otherwise you may end up with duplicate orders and twice as much stock being removed etc. (Not good!)

As mentioned I have a thermal printer to print my shipping labels on (I do not tend to send invoices unless they are requested to save laser printing costs). Can I print my shipping labels from the sales page as per linnworks?

You can print shipping labels from the Magento orders page however Magento does work in a bit of a funky way when it comes to shipping. We found the best way round this was a use of a couple of extensions from Moogento called shipEasy & pickPack. They are a one off cost but offer great flexibility with your pick pack and dispatch process and those members who are now using them have noted a huge decrease in time taken to dispatch products.

Can two people be working on the software at the same time on two different computers,ie can one person be dealing with the despatches while another is listing?

Absolutely, You can create multiple users and can also control what they have access to, and they can all be using different parts of the system at the same time.

I certainly hope that has helped Alison, and if you have any further questions, just shoot them over :)

Dave