Today’s buyers are no longer satisfied with only an online experience. Instead, they want fluidity between all the channels available and between all their devices whenever they make their purchases so they can look at reviews and compare products and/or services before deciding to click purchase. This purchasing behavior is compelling sellers to make their brand’s presence robust, optimized for, and active on multiple channels.
Regardless of the size of your business, the multichannel environment offers a strategic way of communicating and selling products by allowing merchants to reach customers on several channels. But it comes at a cost. It is like adding a second business to the mix. Both require full attention, resources, and marketing efforts to succeed. Unless you have eight arms that you can use simultaneously, you’ll never be able to spin all these plates by using manual spreadsheets alone.
And yes, every experienced seller knows they need a system or more to run their business efficiently. The bigger your catalog is, and the more products you want to sell, the better the system you will need.
Here are some challenges that sellers often face in running their multi-marketplace operations and how good multi-channel software can help:
The bigger your business is, the more listings you need to pay attention to. You need to make sure to coordinate and synchronize sales of the same products across various marketplaces without losing your mind of wasting hours of every day manually creating and updating listings.
You need to work smarter, not harder. Using the right listing software empowers you to manage the entire sales process in just a few clicks. You can expand your reach without suffering through the associated administrative growing pains. You need to ensure that your software allows you to automate product listings, so you can set up product data and descriptions in one place and then upload that data to your marketplaces. Besides, you should also ensure that the software enables bulk image upload, cross-channel business rule management and support automated inventory updates.
One of the big challenges that even experienced sellers face when they start selling products on more channels is keeping up with inventory. Making the wrong choices when it comes to how you manage inventory can be incredibly costly.
Even though it can be advantageous to keep a large supply of inventory at hand, especially once you approach a busy season, it can be expensive, and you may have too much dead stock. The lack of visibility across multiple channels and warehouses will also impact your control over orders, the list of inventories, and the relationships across all warehouses, partners, and manufacturers you need to support all the channels you’re now selling products on.
Using offline spreadsheets to track your inventory is a huge ‘no, no”. You will need the right software/tool to give you automatic real-time updates that make you more efficient. Moreover, having the right tool will give insights into where breakdowns in your processes are happening, how inventory is fluctuating over time, and, most importantly, how your customers’ demand is changing over time.
Every experienced seller knows that running a business is filled with highs and lows — but a good seller knows how to take advantage of the highs to grow as efficiently as possible. Sometimes you might see that a specific item is quickly sold out within a certain week but not for the week after. Or maybe some stores are selling more items compared to other stores.
Analyzing sales trends will help you prepare for those highs and lows. It is also an effective way to strategically build a customer base and help keep your customer base happy by offering them the products they’re most interested in purchasing. You should have the support of the right platform that allows you to get a consolidated view of all your sales, trends, and performance metrics across all your stores. Tracking sales trends allows you to stay one step ahead of competitors and lets you know which are your top and worst sellers.
If you haven’t noticed, it’s about the customer these days. This proves that the moment you put the customer at the core of your business, you are already one step closer to success. These days most shoppers will look on search engines like Google, social media, or marketplace sites before deciding to buy. These websites have unique ways of indexing and surfacing content, especially customer reviews. Keeping your brand favored by their algorithms is quite the challenge.
Having highly positive reviews will eventually help you drive more sales. This is why sellers need the tool to give them the right insights into what customers want. You will need a specific type of platform/tool that allows you not only to receive positive feedback but also to alert you when you receive negative feedback — so you know which of your brands are costing you money. At the end of the day, every seller needs to encourage positive conversations about the brand and create a positive online footprint to boost sales.
Selling on several marketplaces is quite challenging, even for experienced sellers, because each channel may have its peculiarities. However, this should not stop you from expanding your business. You need the right software/platform to help you run your multi-channel retail business. It is essential to first identify the biggest obstacles your business often faces and find the right marketplace management tool to solve them.
MerchantSpring Marketplace Manager is your answer to all those challenges associated with multi-marketplace operations. It is a multi-marketplace, multi-country platform tool that allows you to quickly assess the current performance across all your marketplaces. Connect in minutes. Sell everywhere, smarter. Stop wasting time on endless spreadsheets and manually comparing markets, countries, stores, and platforms. For more information, watch the MerchantSpring Demo. Start your 7-day free trial today (no Credit Card required).
.jpg)
