As the fastest-growing marketplace in the world with over 8 million customers and top household names like Kimberly-Clark, Swan and Procter & Gamble in their catalogue, OnBuy is revolutionising the marketplace industry. They offer a viable, efficient selling channel for retailers of all sizes to expand their reach and increase sales in the UK and soon, globally.
We’ve spoken to Alex Huntley, OnBuy’s strategic seller manager, and partner manager Pete du Pon to offer their insights into how OnBuy supports listed brands. Read on to see how your brand can reach a new audience and generate more sales.
Marketplaces like OnBuy attract millions of customers and act as a one-stop shop for everything from tech to pet supplies, instantly expanding a brand’s exposure to a new audience of consumers. As such, it’s important for brands to have their products available on multiple platforms to ensure they are capturing as much of the market as possible.
As consumer habits continue to evolve and accelerate towards online shopping, it’s vital for brands to consider marketplaces as an additional D2C (direct-to-consumer) tool in their arsenal. Historically, consumers have been drawn to brands on the high street. With consumers now accelerating towards eCommerce, brands need to cast their net wider to reach their full audience.
OnBuy attracts a different type of customer to other UK marketplaces, so listed brands on the platform can take advantage of these incremental sales. If you’re not present, you are missing out on the growing global exposure of this marketplace.
Brands will also want to ensure their products are presented in the best way and by listing their products on marketplaces, it gives them control over how consumers see their product range. They can select high-quality images, create attractive titles and descriptions, and include accurate product data that will convince the customer to purchase.
Brand loyalty is another aspect to consider. Often, consumers will favour a particular brand they have had a positive experience with in the past and will actively seek out that brand going forward. If they come across a product with poor data, they may opt for a competitor’s brand. By having control over the presentation of their products online, brands can capture the customer in the first instance, which will likely lead to repeat sales.
OnBuy gives all retailers, be it brands or individuals, a platform to reach a new audience and the opportunity to align with a fair and transparent marketplace as a partner. Brands are part of this alignment and we want to help them grow with us as we roll out into over 140 new countries by 2023, starting with more than 40 initial sites in 2020.
To help with this, we offer top-level onboarding support from our UK team, assistance with optimising feeds and product pricing, and features to help brands stand out.
For example, OnBuy Brand Ownership is available to sellers who own their brands and can be used to restrict unauthorised resellers from listing on these products. To be eligible for this feature, the seller needs to own a UK or EU trademark (an exemption can be offered for non-barcoded goods).
We can create brand landing pages that allow customers to browse your entire product range in one place. On our categories we also include logo promotion for popular brands to gain increased exposure on the site.
Our upcoming feature called Trading Entities will be available to sellers who want to sell some of their products under different trading names using one OnBuy seller account. Listings can then be assigned to one of the brand’s trading entities, meaning that the products will appear to be sold directly by the brand and appear under a branded storefront.
Diversification for brands is an important part of any growth strategy and marketplaces offer brands the potential to reach new audiences and reinforce brand perception. Marketplaces have experience in getting products seen by millions of customers, thus increasing brand awareness.
Selling on multiple channels is also a sensible way to mitigate risk, reducing the burden on selling through pure-play operations.
For consumers, there’s another level of support when purchasing through a marketplace: they can not only seek assistance from the marketplace itself, but also from the brand, thus increasing the trust of consumers.
When buying and selling on OnBuy, both parties have additional security and protection through our partnership with PayPal. Buyer and Seller Protection ensures any issues can be handled with ease through PayPal’s expert dispute resolution platform, not only instilling more trust in the consumer but minimising risk for the seller too.
We welcome experienced sellers and brands to operate alongside one another on OnBuy, happy in the knowledge that our 8 million plus customers appreciate seeing a wide choice and competitive prices made possible through our low selling fees of just 5-9%.
Some brands are happy with selling on a marketplace alongside a reseller, providing they are authorised to do so by the brand. A reseller may be working with multiple marketplaces alongside their own website and promoting the brand’s products in their inventory, thus expanding the reach of the brand’s products, which, of course, benefits the brand too.
Both the brand and seller can benefit from traffic the other party brings and boost the brand’s presence with higher indexing.
We start by seeing what we need to do with the brand to get them live. To ensure a seamless onboarding and selling experience, this might involve looking at integrations and the fulfilment side of things. Once this is taken care of and the brand has signed up, we can look at getting their products created. Brands can send a list of their best-selling products within their portfolio for us to promote and gain traction.
Ultimately, if the brand has the integrations that we already work with in place, there is little risk in joining us. We also have our Sales Guarantee: should the seller make less than £500 in sales in any month, we’ll waive the next month’s subscription fee.
We want all our sellers to have a positive selling experience and we work closely with them to ensure this happens.
A brand that springs to mind here is Swan, who has been with us since 2019. Their product range spans kitchen appliances and houseware that are particularly popular on OnBuy. We work with Swan on deals and enhancing their brand, which has resulted in a huge increase for the brand since joining us.
We regularly receive feedback from our sellers and Swan has highlighted the ease of our system for managing products and pricing effortlessly.
I would imagine that any brand’s objectives would be to increase sales and brand awareness, which is exactly what we do for our sellers. It’s likely that if a brand sees a competitor selling through OnBuy, they’ll want to join us too to ensure they can tap into that audience.
Joining OnBuy offers opportunities to reach new audiences, achieve higher sales volumes and grow their brand on a transparent and trustworthy platform, which continues to grow at record rates. Any brand with ambitions to grow would consider these core objectives as part of their expansion plans and we’re looking forward to having them join us on OnBuy.com and working together to achieve their goals.
Does OnBuy sound like the right platform for your brand? Get in touch with us at sales@richinsight.co.uk. We’d be happy to have a no obligations chat about the next steps for your business.