27/06/2017
3 Things to Have When Selling on Marketplaces
In this guest post, Jonathan Tait, Head of Marketing at multichannel platform provider Volo Commerce, discusses the basic elements any successful multichannel business should aim to have.
Marketplaces have a bad reputation in some quarters, on both sides of the business/customer divide. Some businesses feel that the fees are too high, or that they’re unsupported, and customers get burned by a single bad experience and are hard to win back.
And yet, businesses flourish by selling through marketplaces, and they’re increasingly popular with consumers. So what can we learn from those who succeed on marketplaces?
1. Build good foundations – three pillars are better than one
The first point has already been made in our guest blog here – the invaluable resilience and increased exposure that selling on multiple channels offers gives these businesses stability and security, especially when managed centrally through a system like Volo Origin.
Being totally reliant on a single channel is not a strong business foundation, and in the long term businesses should be looking to spread their revenue and risk across several channels.
2. Best Practice – for each sales channel, for each business
There are quirks and specific challenges to each individual sales channel – nowhere is this more apparent than marketplaces, which have their own standards, approaches and requirements.
The most successful multichannel ecommerce businesses have a detailed understanding of the best practices and successful tactics for their personal business model on each sales channel – of course, this is easy to recommend in a blog and hard to come by as a business.
That’s why at Volo we have experienced customer success managers who impart this wisdom to businesses on a personal basis – wisdom we’ve picked up over the course of 11 years in the ecommerce game, applied not as a blanket rule, but individually tailored to the requirements and resources of the businesses we work with.
3. Resource – helping hands, partnership and a community
Who do you trust more: the armchair pundit, or someone who’s played the game? It’s always helpful to have someone to turn to who has marketplace selling and business experience. Our Community Hub is a place where ecommerce business owners, managers and employees go to ask and answer questions, as well as learn from regular updates and news.
All businesses experience challenges. Sometimes these are directly linked to marketplace selling, for example eBay changing their policy on active content in listings, which requires a migration of every single listing to a new template, which itself has to be designed.
Our Creative Services team worked on hundreds of listing template redesigns to ensure that our customers who wanted help to become compliant received it, protecting their brand and revenue on eBay.
If you’d like our help growing your business across channels, come and have a chat with us.