Selling through marketplaces? Here’s how to do it!
Online marketplaces, where consumers can shop at different brands and retailers, have become an important part of the e-commerce world. More and more platforms are opening up as marketplaces and existing marketplaces are becoming more dominant, both nationally and internationally. This creates a change in customer behavior: online shoppers increasingly start their search on a sales platform instead of via a search engine. In its blue paper, the Marketplaces expert group demonstrates how you, as a retailer, can respond.
(Web) retailers who want to sell via market places must first properly map out how all the sales channels – that they use or want to use – are connected. The e-commerce quadrant below is a handy tool for setting up your partners and online channels, making the trade-off between control and insight on the one hand, versus reach on the other. Different dynamics require a different kind of approach and every channel allows you to serve a different target group. So you need a different strategy for each channel.
In practice, the divide between the different channels is obviously less black-and-white and the quadrants often blend together. Think of Blokker launching a marketplace or Coolblue opening physical locations. Hybrid platforms are also emerging that partly sell their own goods and services, and partly are a marketplace. The advantage for these parties is that, thanks to their large scale, they can also use their own warehousing and fulfilment for the marketplace, something that sellers can benefit from. For optimum results, you should use all channels and let them strengthen each other.
The pros and cons of market places
If you are going to use a marketplace as a retailer, it is good to list the advantages and disadvantages of selling through these platforms, such as getting a larger reach versus a lack of customer relationship, the ability to latch onto innovations and have an easier entry into foreign markets, but also the high commissions and other costs.
The use of a marketplace as a sales channel is not something that you "just do on the side", because will impact your entire organisation. That is why it is important to develop the right knowledge and skills and / or to determine what you want to do yourself (as an organisation) and what you want to outsource. First make an inventory of the knowledge and skills that are needed, and then decide for each organisational unit what is already available to help you get started or accelerate (further).
Just get started
The expert group's advice: just get started! Do start small though: choose one brand, one marketplace and one country where you can shift and scale up easily. Focus on the following components:
- Stock and order processing
- Content
- Visibility
- Scalability
Want to know more about selling through market places and how you can do this successfully? Just download blue paper by the Market places expert group . This expert group was made possible in part by Newcraft and DPD.