eBay sales flatlining? Recurring problems with distribution? Finding Amazon hard to manage? Don’t worry, you’re not alone. Online marketplaces offer myriad benefits - from boosting brand exposure to accessing global customers - but they also come with complex challenges, especially for growing SMEs that don’t have specialist marketplace know-how.
At eManaged, we’ve used our marketplace expertise to support hundreds of businesses that are struggling to make marketplaces work. Here’s our top 10 tips to improve your marketplace performance.
Enhancing marketplace performance
- Optimise listings - Are your product descriptions concise, accurate and enticing? Is your pricing reflective of the marketplace and competitors’ products? Have you got all the attributed data filled in and mapped to channel filters? Have you taken time to analyse top ranking relevant search terms and added those to your titles and bullets? From analysing sales history to reviewing search trends, there’s an array of data at your disposal to optimise your marketplace listings.
- Adopt a multichannel strategy - Don’t limit yourself to Amazon or eBay. There are 150+ global online marketplaces that range from general products (i.e. Walmart and Rakuten) to niche offerings (i.e. Etsy’s handcrafts or Zalando’s fashion). Spreading stock across a few channels can also disperse risk and increase your chance of reaching your target consumer. Each channel has a loyal buyer base and you want to tap into them all.
- Seek Amazon management expertise - Although Amazon often provides the largest opportunity for sales for many verticals (Amazon accounts for 37.8% of all e-commerce sales), the different account levers can overwhelm a single Amazon hire. Amazon needs specialist skills in marketing, branding, logistics, customer care and more, and one single hire can’t do it all effectively. Get the right skills for the right levers on Amazon.
- Think internationally - Selling globally is not logistically viable for all products (i.e. perishables and bulky items), but if possible for all or part of your product range, you can make big gains in international markets - especially with plenty of logistics models simplifying international sales and distribution. Get the international ball rolling by first researching global marketplaces to see where similar products are selling.
- Localise content - 65% of customers prefer buying in their native languages (even if the content is poor) and 40% of consumers won’t buy products at all in another language. However, translating your product descriptions for local contexts is just the start. For true localisation, you should think about local pricing (i.e. willingness to pay), customer service expectations (i.e. Chatbot or over the phone) and cultural preferences (i.e. date as month/day/year or day/month/year).
- Don’t underestimate eBay - People often think of the eBay of yesteryear: a used goods market with last-minute bidding for large discounts, but ‘not a fit for my brand’. However, eBay has become a major sales platform for a number of big brands (especially fashion) and comes second only to Amazon in terms of monthly visits (almost 3 billion per month). If you’re not selling on eBay, consider a clearance and sales channel strategy that aligns to eBay buyers and gives you control over this billion-pound market.
- Adopt Amazon with care - If you choose to sell on Amazon, you have a choice: Seller Central or Vendor Central. With Vendor Central, you sell your products directly to Amazon who then resell them as their own. With Seller Central, you sell directly to Amazon's customers and have much more control over price and branding in order to boost sales. Vendor Central can be an easier transaction and generate bulk cash-in-hand, but they also have lock-in clauses that are hard to move away from and reduces your price control, which impacts other channels. Make sure Amazon adoption strategies are done with thought for the long-term.
- Manage stock efficiently - This may seem obvious, but many marketplace sellers list their products without thinking about product storage, distribution and logistics, to name just a few. Channels often have their own logistics to adopt for search perks - i.e. FBA for Prime, ZFS on Zalando, GSP on eBay and Cdiscount fulfilment - which are important to leverage. What’s more, make sure to forecast stock so you don’t run out, which not only causes a disruption to revenue and sales, but also provides an opportunity for competitors to soak up market share.
- Fine-tune marketing - Marketing matters. Just because your products can be found more easily on marketplaces, doesn’t mean customers will decide to purchase them. For example, a third of all Amazon sales now come from PPC advertising and eBay’s PLAs (their version of PCC) are having an increasingly dominant effect. Make sure to allocate marketing budget and expertise to each individual channel in order to market top sellers effectively.
- Use the right tools - Given marketplaces' growing dominance of e-commerce (the top marketplaces accounted for over $3.25 trillion of sales in 2022), it’s unsurprising that a wide range of software has been developed specifically for the industry. From dynamic pricing mechanisms to cart conversion tools, using the right software for our products can rocketboost your marketplace sales. Above all else, report, track and analyse your data. We offer bespoke tools in this area because everything starts with first knowing what’s working, what isn't and where the opportunities are to grow.
Attract, Engage, Delight
Online marketplaces are unique. Thanks to their operations models and levels of direct customer interaction, marketplaces cannot be considered as a standard sales funnel. Instead, improving performance is all about attracting, engaging and delighting customers.