Who and how will succeed on marketplaces?

Care to share?

Marketplaces are the simplest and quickest way to generate additional revenue online. The existing eCommerce can diversify their business, companies beginning their eCommerce activities can rapidly mark their place online and start generating revenue before the creation of a dedicated eStore.

Who are Marketplaces for?

Marketplaces are the best solution for three types of companies:

  • Producers offering their own and unique products – e.g. clothing, jewelry, interior design, art.
  • Retailers selling niche and hobby products – less competition and less risk that the marketplace will want to compete with you. Good examples include vinyls, collectors’ gadgets, etc.
  • Outlet retailers – companies focused on offering very low prices for price-sensitive consumers – it works in terms of books and electronics, but also in many other categories – e.g. sports accessories.

How to succeed in Marketplaces?

We list the most important success factors below.

Adapting the offer to the market and the marketplace

In the case of marketplaces, each offer must hold up, also compared with its competition. Good photos, detailed descriptions and adapting to customer requirements are critical. Divante clients, selling in markets across Europe adapt not only their descriptions but also photos. In the case of fashion, models have to correspond with the target audience and even the types of local beauty.

Escape from productization

The marketplace will seek to compare offers directly. In the case of products with EAN codes or generic names, there may be cases of merging product sheets and direct comparison of prices already in the sheet. This is obviously disadvantageous from the perspective of the seller. Therefore, we should ensure that the offer was easy to find but difficult to compare. Experienced sellers know many tricks that we shouldn’t share here in a blog post. If you’re interested in learning about them, please contact me directly.

SEO

In marketplaces preparing an easy to find offer is extremely important. On the one hand, you have to ensure that the internal mechanisms of the marketplace position your offer highly, on the other, you also have to take care of feeding Google and other local search engines. Advanced marketplace management software allows, among other things, for launching new auctions without changing the HTTP address and loss of organic SEO.

Most marketplaces and search engines can use keywords related to the product name, brand, producer, and IDs typical for the industry, such as EAN or ISBN. These fields are the minimum that you should provide.

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Service quality

In marketplaces, service quality is of paramount importance. Your offer may be positioned lower or you can be moved out of the marketplace altogether if your service quality is inadequate. You should continuously monitor parameters related to logistics, customer support, and payments. Marketplace customers are less forgiving and quickly resort to giving negative reviews. On the other hand – a systematic approach and ensuring high quality can be your valuable differentiator and make your offer to be positioned higher. What should you pay attention to? Amazon provides some advice on how to become a preferred supplier (How to win a Buy Button) at www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html.

Marketing

Marketplaces provide a variety of internal marketing tools. You have to provide an adequate budget to exist at a marketplace and get first positive feedback. The effectiveness of marketing tools within the categories may vary significantly. Ideally, your marketplace software will allow you to determine the ROI for each offer.

Manage your content across all customer touchpoints with Pimcore >

The start is very important

Entering a new marketplace is particularly important. You need to quickly get positive feedback from customers and the marketplace itself.
Two popular tactics to get a positive and quick start are:

  1. Start with products with small competition – it will be easier for you to stand out with your service quality and offers.
  2. Experiment with offering very attractive prices for popular products – your goal at the start is not high ROI but getting a large number of completed transactions.

Read also: How to shorten the project time by half

Published July 18, 2018