Multichannel Integration: Why eCommerce Business Needs It
Multichannel integration is a safe way of expanding your business and increasing revenue. Whether you are just starting your ecommerce business or exploring opportunities to grow the existing one, additional sales channels will help you get the desired results. Marketing products on a single store is good, and selling them on multiple marketplaces is far more beneficial.
Let’s take a closer look at the reasons why you need to consider multichannel integration for your business.
Multichannel Online Retailing: How It Can Benefit Your Business
The advent of the internet allowed anyone to create an online business in minutes by opening an online store. While starting with a single sales channel is a common practice, there is no further expansion without additional channels.
Multichannel Selling: What Is It and Why You Need It?
Multichannel selling entails marketing your products on various marketplaces, like Amazon, eBay, Etsy, etc. The primary goals of such sales strategy are business scaling, increasing product visibility, and reaching a wider audience of potential customers.
Customers and merchants benefit from multichannel retailing. Your products are presented on various platforms and buyers can make purchases on the ones they choose. Retail companies get a chance to reach more potential customers, and it results in more sold products and increased revenue.
So, who needs multichannel selling? If a business is based on sales, then you should utilize multichannel selling. Your company size does not matter as multiple sales channels provide retailers of all sizes with additional advantages and enable them to compete with big retailers.
Multichannel eCommerce and the Benefits It Offers
Multichannel ecommerce is a very promising area, providing almost unlimited opportunities for companies that follow the course of business expansion. Here is the list of the most attractive advantages.
1. Strengthening brand recognition
The most popular brands are omnipresent. They utilize multichannel selling to the utmost by being present on various platforms and marketplaces. You can follow their lead and add your listings on Amazon, eBay, Walmart, and other relevant marketplaces. The more customers see your brand, the more they are likely to purchase your products.
2. Reaching a wider audience
Many online retailers struggle to attract visitors to their online stores while those who operate on marketplaces get access to multimillion audiences. Amazon alone has more than 200 million monthly visitors and all of them may become your potential customers.
Many buyers prefer to shop on marketplaces due to the variety of product categories presented there. Sellers enjoy higher product views and more potential customers you can market products to.
3. Increasing revenue
This is probably the most wanted result of multichannel integration and the main reason why companies start selling on a variety of marketplaces. Instead of dedicating time to marketing your website and making it visible in search results, you instantly get access to millions of potential customers. You can sell more and increase revenue.
4. Battling competition
Multichannel integration allows selling products where your competitors sell. If they are on Etsy, Amazon, or eBay, you should also be present there. Even if they don’t sell there, use marketplaces as a competitive advantage.
Listing products on multiple sales channels puts you in front of many customers and increase your chances of winning them over.
Multichannel Integration: The Main Downsides
Even though multichannel selling attracts more and more sellers due to the promised advantages, there are a few challenges that might stop you from exploring it.
1. Transferring products
Before you start selling on any marketplace, you need to create your product catalog with product names, specifications, and detailed descriptions. The moment you need to transfer products from your website to a new sales channel may be a few days away from the moment you start selling. The need to manually create listings for hundreds of products is the main downside.
2. Inventory management
Exceptional customer experience is your primary goals as an online seller. The last thing you need is to oversell and disappoint clients. When orders come from various resources, it is quite challenging to keep track of your inventory. Order and inventory management make a toll on your business when it starts to grow.
3. Analytics
As an owner of ecommerce business, you need to know what sales channels work and where your strategy needs to be improved. Collecting data from all channels is time-consuming and complicated. You need to spend a lot of time analyzing data and making data-driven decisions.
Overcoming Challenges with Effective Tools
Fortunately for those engaged in multichannel selling, all of the above problems can be solved with a single and easy-to-use tool – Sellbery.
Sellbery is a multi-channel listing tool for automatic synchronization of product listings, order, and inventory data between online stores and marketplaces. The platform reduces manual work needed to create listings on various marketplaces as you can add them once and transfer to other selling channels. Short synchronization intervals of 15 minutes allow keeping all data up to date.
Sellbery is compatible with the largest and most popular ecommerce platforms. The list of integrations includes Amazon, Etsy, eBay, Walmart, as well as online stores built with Shopify, Magento, WooCommerce and many others.
The multichannel listing platform offers various plans for different types of companies:
- Starter Plan is for you if you just want to explore multichannel selling. The plan is free for 99 SKUs (Stock Keeping Units)
- Small Business Plan offers 100-599 SKUs for 29€
- Medium Business Plan provides you with 501-5000 SKUs for 49€
- Large Business Plan gives 5001-15000 SKUs for 99€
- Enterprise Plan allows creating 15000+ SKUs for a custom price.
Try out all the benefits Sellbery offers and enjoy the benefits of selling your products on the largest marketplaces.
It Is Time for Multichannel Selling
As you can see for yourself, multichannel integration is vital for any ecommerce owner that wants to grow business, find new customers, and eventually increase revenue. Try it out to see how it works for your ecommerce business.
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November 29, 2018