Selling on a marketplace: some tips
Laia Ordoñez
14/07/2015
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A few days ago we lay on the table an important question that many people who are starting to sell online ask themselves: marketplaces, yes or no? Deciding to sell on a marketplace like Amazon, eBay or Rakuten is not easy: it is a crucial decision that can determine the future of our business, as we noted on our list of pros and cons. If you are one of those who have already decided to sell on a marketplace, it is not needless to say that you should have some recommendations in mind in case someday you want to interact with your customers exclusively through your own online store.
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1. Selling on a Marketplace: use social networks ( a lot)
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One of the biggest disappointments that, sooner or later, marketplaces sellers face is discovering that their customers are not theirs but belong to the marketplace. If a seller wants to set up its own online store, it has to do it from scratch, without access to the database of customers it had on the marketplace. For this reason, it is highly recommended to invest (a long) time , and from the very beginning, in talking with your customers in order to build a relationship between them and its brand through social networks; Thus, if tomorrow it wants to leave eBay or Amazon, it will already a legion of fans that will follow wherever it goes.
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2. Selling on a marketplace: always have your own shop
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Although your online store is very, very simple, since it is on Amazon, eBay or Rakuten means that neither it is yours, nor yourclients, nor much less the platform in which you carry out your business. Thus, you have to find a formula that allows you to attract customers and build value; and the best formula is providing your customers an own online store, as well as the one you have on the marketplace. In this way, the customer can decide by itself if it purchases through the marketplace or through your online store. If it chooses the latter, you can gradually build a database which you can communicate with,offering promotions, offers , gifts and performing other actions that any marketplace would you ever make. Luckily, today ecommerce platforms are very usable and cheap as the WooCommerce toolkit of Wordpress or Oleoshop, which for just €20 per month allows you to have a very cool online store in a few steps.
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3. Selling on a marketplace: sell a product with low commission
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When you start selling on a marketplace, the cost usually seems fair; After all, they only charge you a small commission on each sale and little more. But when the pace of sales goes up, commissions also rise and situation of lack of control may take place, reaching the point that the commission takes a large part of your commercial margin. That is why it is interesting to apply some tricks so you can get higher performance to your investment from the start. For example, if the marketplace charges you a fixed percentage on sale, sell low-priced products that result in low commissions. On the other hand, if you want to promote one of your ads, do it always with high-commercial margin products, allowing you to asume the promotion, the commission on the sale and other expenses without losing money.
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4. Selling on a marketplace: choose which product you sell
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One of the things to avoid when selling on a marketplace is to offer all your catalogue on it. The thing is that if the user can find all you offer on a marketplace, it may never want to by on your online store: After all, on the marketplace apart from your products, he can also find products from your competition and other many categories of product, and it can benefit from promotions and cross promotions you you will never be able to offer. For this reason, one of the first things you should do when you start selling on a marketplace is a careful selection of the product that you are going to sell, always making sure that you offer on your online store an interesting part of your catalogue exclusively.
Thus, you are going to attract users who are happy with you as a seller on the marketplace and will encourage them to sign up on your online store to buy from you directly.