A potential customer asked about how JoeLister was different from InkFrog. I never thought to do an Inkfrog review before — but I wanted to be able to give an educated answer about how InkFrog was different from alternatives such as JoeLister.
I had heard of InkFrog but never used their product and thus could not do a great job in answering the question. In wanting to know better, I decided to try an InkFrog free trial and thus will write my InkFrog thoughts and a comparison review here.
I sell frequently on both Amazon and eBay, so I was excited to learn what InkFrog had to offer. I am always looking to learn about the best Amazon seller software programs.
Let’s get started.
InkFrog Inventory Setup
The InkFrog initial setup with my eBay account was painless. I also was able to easily connect my Amazon account.
Let’s get moving with some Amazon Inventory to list some of my Amazon products on eBay.
InkFrog has many features related to inventory but the number of settings and warnings here are overwhelming.
Content Updates
Similar to the inventory settings, the content updating features throw a lot at you. I appreciate the flexibility, but wish setup was more streamlined.
The goal of products like should be to easily list items on eBay to save time.
Here is a core difference between JoeLister and InkFrog:
JoeLister treats Amazon as your source of products but InkFrog allows you to use their service as your product listing source.
That makes setup more involved.
Inkfrog says it requires Advertising API access to get your product images and info for your Amazon products. JoeLister does this for you without any special setup thanks to the Zinc API.
InkFrog Amazon Inventory
After a lot of setup I had items displaying in my view.
But the same products were listed over and over — I did not understand why. These were also very old Amazon products and not current items.
Is a filter needed to fix this issue? Let’s pull up the filter:
At this point I was feeling stuck. I had no idea how to view active Amazon items to list them on eBay.
Getting Amazon Inventory to Load Within InkFrog is Confusing
Then I realized that I was viewing old eBay listings. The user interface was not clear about that.
Since I had added my Amazon store to InkFrog, I was expecting to see Amazon listings.
This was frustrating.
Apparently, I had more setup to do. Even though I had added my Amazon account, I had no Amazon products imported.
In JoeLister we automatically import your active Amazon inventory after you connect your Amazon account.
InkFrog Requires You to Manually Select eBay Categories to List Within
To import Amazon products with InkFrog I have to work through more settings related to picking eBay categories to list within.
Picking eBay categories was going to be tough as I sell mostly random stuff from all kinds of categories.
JoeLister picks categories for you on the fly as you list items on eBay. We don’t require any time working in setup like this.
We also do not limit you to only six categories.
InkFrog Has a Lot of Settings
Ok I picked my six categories (hard to decide as I sell random items).
Now I had more settings to deal with:
After completing that step, sadly I found even more setup was required.
After filling out that section of settings, somehow, I did it wrong:
I had to select a shipping service. Since I ship either FedEx or USPS (depending on what is cheapest) — I like to just use a generic shipping service = “Standard Shipping”.
But I don’t see that off the bat. Is it there?
Ok found “Economy Shipping” and now have more settings to wrestle with.
If you love going through settings — InkFrog may be the service for you.
Loading Amazon Products
The ball is now rolling, and I wait for Amazon inventory to load.
Inventory loads right away, and you see a nice visual bar:
As I am waiting for the products to load. I realized InkFrog had sent me an email.
There I found more bad news…yet even more setup to do:
After Amazon inventory loading is done it is time to decide to import all or just some listings. I chose all.
More waiting:
This time things were a lot slower. Time for a coffee break.
15 minutes later I was still waiting unfortunately.
This was painfully slow and was going to take hours. So I stopped for the weekend and decided to come back to InkFrog on Monday.
After the weekend my inventory was loaded but it is was strange to see products that sold years ago.
JoeLister imports active items only and not products you last sold years ago.
I saw some filters available to use on my imported Amazon listings, but seemingly none to only view active Amazon inventory.
That is unfortunate and frustrating.
I thought maybe “importing as new products” may give me what I wanted. But in that view, I was still seeing several products from several years ago.
I gave up trying to just see current items and decided to manually find something active to list when things got much worse.
I clicked on a list button after picking an imported active product. But InkFrog was going to list 228 items on my eBay account. I only wanted to list that one.
I clicked the back button in my browser and was put back to the very beginning of the import tool. There was no way to get my Amazon import back (the one that took several hours to process).
It seems the Amazon import just resides within memory and was no longer available.
For my own mental health I had to give up trying to list any Amazon items on eBay with InkFrog.
I did not have the time or patience to load all of my Amazon inventory again. Because of this I am not sure if InkFrog supports automated repricing support or support for Amazon variations.
Other InkFrog Features
Let’s discuss some of the other InkFrog features.
You can create a new eBay listing (not based from Amazon products). Although I am not sure how this is easier or different from just using the eBay app.
InkFrog seems to want to be your store of product information which is a different philosophical direction from JoeLister.
One of the primary benefits to using InkFrog appears to be a vast template gallery.
This is nicely done, if you care about fancy graphical templates for your eBay listings.
Once you pick the template you can personalize it further.
This is nicely done and much easier to use than the Amazon section of InkFrog.
List to Amazon from eBay
InkFrog has a feature in Beta for listing to Amazon from eBay.
This is something we don’t have with JoeLister. JoeLister is strictly focused on Amazon to eBay listing.
I picked a random item for a test.
The process bar was not moving.
Ten minutes later this was still not doing anything. I was still at 0% progress.
This feature seems to still need some work.
InkFrog Cannot List to Shopify
JoeLister recently added support for Shopify but InkFrog has yet to add any support for listing to Shopify stores.
Being able to start to build your own brand with your own store on Shopify is an important step for serious Amazon sellers who want to keep growing their business.
InkFrog’s eBay support seems like the main focus to them right now.
Conclusions
To conclude our InkFrog review — InkFrog is a poor choice if you want to quickly and easily list your Amazon inventory on eBay.
The InkFrog setup is confusing and even overwhelming at times, the importing process from Amazon is extremely time consuming, with no way to view active current items, and I was never able to successfully list an item (as my inventory disappeared).
Inkfrog needs more work to be an effective tool for listing Amazon items on eBay.
I don’t believe InkFrog is a true alternative to JoeLister, but instead is more akin to a product such as CrazyLister.
Inkfrog does have easy to use tools to view existing eBay listings, edit eBay listings, and create new eBay listings.
You can also easily enable visual eBay templates for creating more graphically appealing eBay listings.
The eBay template area of InkFrog is very well built, but the other features seem to be cobbled on and are buggy and difficult to the point of frustration.
If you are an eBay first seller, InkFrog is worth checking out.
If you want to easily list your Amazon products on eBay — InkFrog alternatives such as JoeLister would be a better choice.
For reviews of JoeLister be sure to check out our reviews section.
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