Dive Brief:

• Adobe on Monday unveiled a free downloadable extension dubbed Amazon Sales Channel, available in its Magento Marketplace, to help sellers integrate key operations like inventory management between their Amazon Marketplace pages and their own websites. 

• The extension will likely also be available in the near future for merchants who sell on Walmart, eBay or other marketplaces, Jason Woosley, Adobe vice president of commerce, told Retail Dive in an interview.

• The add-on comes almost exactly a year after Adobe's nearly $1.7 billion acquisition of commerce platform vendor Magento Commerce, with the goal of creating a comprehensive e-commerce platform integrating B2C and B2B customer experiences. 

Dive Insight:

This news, which pits Adobe's Magento offer against Shopify, comes​ as Amazon solidifies its place as the go-to marketplace for third-party sellers.

About half (49%) of merchants responding to Feedvisor's latest State of the Amazon Marketplace report sell almost exclusively on Amazon, with that revenue accounting for 80% to 100% of their total e-commerce sales. Nearly two-thirds (64%) owe more than 60% of their total e-commerce revenue to Amazon, Feedvisor found. A little over half (53%) of respondents told Feedvisor that eBay makes up less than 20% of their total e-commerce revenue and over two-fifths (46%) said that Walmart.com garners them the same amount, according to the report, which was released Wednesday.

While it stands to reason, then, that Adobe's Magento suite would cater first and foremost to Amazon sellers, it may be more of a game changer to those looking to diversify their outlets by expanding to Walmart, eBay and other platforms like Walmart-owned Jet, according to Fahim Naim, a former category manager at Amazon and now founder and CEO of e-commerce growth consulting firm eShopportunity.com, who called the new Magento extension a "nice-to-have" plugin.

"The size and the scale of Walmart's marketplace right now is so far behind Amazon, maybe that's actually where Magento could be useful," he told Retail Dive in an interview. "If all it takes is me to enable this plugin — maybe there would be a larger uptick in on-boarding new sellers to Walmart."

Adobe says that the Magento add-on makes life easier for Amazon sellers. Using it, sellers can sync Amazon information backwards into their Magento catalogs; use automated pricing rules; automate product listings and sync their catalogs to the Amazon Marketplace using listing rules; synchronize inventory with Amazon; manage multiple Amazon brands and marketplace regions from one centralized dashboard; list products as merchant fulfilled, Fulfillment by Amazon (FBA) or a mix of fulfillment methods; and offer tiered pricing based on quantity purchased with a B2B pricing functionality, according to Woosley​'s blog post.

But, while Woosley told Retail Dive that the solution breaks down significant barriers to selling on Amazon while also maintaining a stand-alone website, Naim said it's unlikely to meaningfully boost the number of sellers on Amazon's third-party marketplace, which CEO Jeff Bezos said earlier this year now accounts for 58% of goods sold through the e-commerce giant.

"I think most people understand the value of Amazon," Naim told Retail Dive. "Anybody who's knee deep in the e-commerce game is willing to take on complexity. It's nice to have and makes it easier —​ certainly there's some benefit. But I don't think you're going to see hundred of thousands of sellers saying 'now I'll sell on Amazon.'"