Banyan Surplus sells new and used surplus parts from a warehouse in Hudsonville, Michigan: car and truck parts, bearings, motors, hydraulics, conveyor parts and much more. The whole catalog lived on eBay, more than 34,000 listings, each already placed in an exact eBay category with photos, specifications and a condition note. The owner wanted a store of the business’s own, without retyping a single part and without two inventories drifting apart.
What the store had to do
- Copy every eBay listing, every day, with its photos, specifications, condition and price, and drop items that sold.
- Let buyers find a part without knowing the jargon. Some arrive with a part number; others only know they need “brake pads for my truck”.
- Keep the staff side simple: see orders, mark them shipped, print packing slips, and hear about new orders right away.
- Keep running on its own, with nothing depending on one office computer.
What we built
- A storefront on Wix’s business backend, custom-coded with Astro and hosted by Wix. Wix runs the catalog, cart, checkout, member logins and forms; the pages are built for parts.
- A daily eBay sync that runs on GitHub’s servers every morning, reads new, changed and ended listings within eBay’s limits, and updates the store. A daily check reports in the team’s Discord only when something needs attention.
- A parts finder: one search box for a part number or a plain description, and six areas (cars and trucks, factory equipment, conveyors and packaging, hydraulics and air, motors and electrical, pumps and water) that narrow the parts on the spot.
- Categories that follow eBay’s own tree, so the thousands of choices Banyan already made on eBay carry over, from “Automotive” down to the exact part type.
- Forgiving part-number search and brand pages, with official logos on the brand tiles.
- “Fits these vehicles” on car and truck parts, taken from the listing, shown on the product page and in the page’s structured data.
- A staff order screen where workers sign in with their own accounts, plus Discord alerts for new orders and form messages with every detail in the message.
How it runs now
Banyan keeps listing and editing on eBay, the same as before. The store follows each morning. Photos are served from eBay’s image servers, so the store isn’t limited by storage, and every page was checked at nine screen sizes, from a small phone to a wide desktop.
If you sell on eBay and want a store of your own beside it, our page on online stores for eBay and surplus sellers explains how this kind of build works, and the eBay and inventory integration page covers the sync.