Extend your online sales channels with third party marketplaces
Most folks are more than familiar with the following idiomatic phrases: “diversification is the key to success” and “don’t put all your eggs in one basket.” And many are familiar with them in a business context. For example, when you sell products and services from your company’s website, you benefit by increasing the number of sales channels available to your customers – diversification is the key to success. Selling through a third-party marketplace also helps you mitigate the financial risks that come from a-one-site-fits-all strategy – putting all your eggs in one basket.
To harness the truth in these idiomatic phrases for sales purposes, the key is to ask yourself these questions: Is your own website truly reaching your entire target market? How can you further broaden your reach and elevate sales? The answer to these questions is to expand your business using online third-party marketplaces. It has been a proven strategy for many small to midsize merchants. Just think of the reach that Amazon has. Multichannel marketplaces like Amazon, eBay, Newegg, Ratkuten and Sears, act as aggregators for prospects primed to make a purchase.
By augmenting your online sales with multiple marketplace connections, you increase brand awareness by casting a wider net to a global audience. This enables you to educate, engage and nurture new prospects into future buying customers.
For those who carry the burden of managing inventory, selling on third-party marketplaces can be a godsend. It offers the opportunity to market and sell unsellable goods that are damaged, rejected or expired, slow-moving or unsold inventory and seasonal or discontinued inventory.
Selling on multiple third-party marketplaces, however, doesn’t come easy. Someone at your company must manage the process, handling tasks like manually processing orders – a time- and resource-consuming process. The same goes for synchronizing inventory levels and pricing updates. If inventory levels are not coordinated with the marketplaces you are leveraging, you will experience high levels of order cancellations for out-of-stock goods. Every marketplace will penalize a merchant for cancellations – detrimental to a business’s ranking as a marketplace merchant.
The manual option might be reasonable if you are not performing a high volume of transactions, but if you are doing more than a dozen orders daily, there are robust and affordable options available to streamline the process.
What you need is a tool to automate the entire financial transaction from a marketplace purchase to fulfillment at the system of record (SOR) level. Your solution, however, needs to be an affordable cloud-based service that can handle high-volume marketplace orders. It will also need, at a minimum, the following functionality: (i) imports orders to your SOR; (ii) performs order confirmation with tracking information; (iii) centrally manages pricing updates and synchronizes inventory across multiple marketplaces; (iv) automatically updates marketplaces to keep your inventory in-sync.
BalanceMaxx, a simple low-cost solution to automate the entire process was developed by NetSphere Strategies. It was designed to remove the administrative burden of keeping up with the velocity of sales that you hope to achieve.
Download the BalanceMaxx brochure to learn how you can capitalize on the business benefits of this marketplace solution.