In today's dynamic eCommerce landscape, selling on multiple marketplaces has become increasingly important for businesses to reach a wider audience and maximize their sales potential.

Today, thanks to technology, you have an incredible opportunity to work in a simplified and automated manner, allowing you to save time on manual tasks, all at special prices.

The reality is that people are more likely to buy from sellers looking like legitimate retailers who sell on established marketplaces. This way, online store owners can automatically benefit from the platform’s brand-building.

Finally, B2B eCommerce sales through websites and online marketplaces are accelerating. According to Gartner, the enterprise marketplace is a new business model that:

• Has new capabilities
• Creates wider ecosystems
• Allows brands to attract new audiences and generate new sources of revenue.

The team behind the easySales platform, an integrated marketplace solution for relevant marketplaces in Romania, Hungary, Bulgaria, England, USA, and Germany, has observed a significant increase in the proportion of sales from marketplaces during campaign periods, compared to orders from their websites. While the average share of processed orders from marketplaces in non-campaign months is 60%, during campaign periods, this proportion increases to 70%.

However, managing multiple marketplace accounts and ensuring seamless operations can be quite challenging. In this article, we will explore some effective solutions to overcome the challenges associated with selling on multiple marketplaces.

7 Strategies for Overcoming the Challenge of Selling on Multiple Marketplaces

1. Centralized eCommerce Platform:

One of the key solutions to efficiently manage multiple marketplaces is to leverage a centralized eCommerce platform. These platforms offer features that allow businesses to sync and manage their inventory, orders, and product listings across various marketplaces from a single dashboard. This eliminates the need to manually update and track each marketplace individually, saving time and reducing the risk of errors.

2. Integrated Inventory Management:

Maintaining accurate inventory levels across multiple marketplaces is crucial to avoid overselling or stockouts. Integrated inventory management solutions provide real-time synchronization of inventory data, ensuring that stock levels are automatically updated across all marketplaces as sales occur. This helps businesses maintain inventory accuracy, improve customer satisfaction, and streamline order fulfillment.

3. Automated Order Management:

Processing and fulfilling orders from multiple marketplaces manually can be time-consuming and prone to errors. By implementing automated order management systems, businesses can streamline the entire order fulfillment process. These systems automatically import orders from various marketplaces, assign them to appropriate fulfillment channels, and generate shipping labels and invoices, saving valuable time and reducing human errors.

4. Listing Optimization and Syndication:

Each marketplace has its listing requirements and best practices to maximize visibility and conversions. Managing product listings individually for each marketplace can be cumbersome. With listing optimization and syndication tools, businesses can efficiently create and optimize product listings to meet the specific requirements of multiple marketplaces. These tools help streamline the listing process, ensuring consistent branding and accurate product information across all platforms.

There are listed products that consumers see, and there are products that consumers buy. What makes the difference? The product description. Titles, descriptions, and categories are often what drive consumers to make a purchase and have a physical buying experience. That's why effort in preparing comprehensive and relevant descriptions, as well as high-quality images of the products being sold. Every product listing aims to ultimately provide a higher level of satisfaction and service quality for both customers and potential customers. 84% of consumers consider the services they receive as a key factor in their purchasing decisions, and only 3% say that customer services are not important.

Marketplaces often offer efficient functions for sellers to advertise their own brands or products and the utilisation of such tools can also make a big difference in the sales results.

5. Diversifying the delivery strategy

Consumers not only desire but also expect to receive products quickly and for free. "For example, free shipping attracts 79% of US consumers to shop online." Optimizing deliveries is a key component when it comes to selling on multiple marketplaces. The ability to offer flexible delivery methods such as courier, locker, or different time intervals makes the difference between successful deliveries and returned products. Integrating multiple couriers helps you understand which couriers perform well in delivering fragile packages and which ones to rely on for fast and cost-effective delivery. Without a cost-effective way to meet these requirements, deliveries can eat into profits and impact a customer's buying experience. There are various ways to diversify the delivery strategy – some merchants choose to work with specific couriers, others opt for fulfillment companies or courier integrators, and there are merchants who use a mix of all these approaches.

6. Performance Analytics and Reporting:

To make informed business decisions and optimize selling strategies, it is essential to have access to comprehensive performance analytics and reporting. Utilizing analytics tools that provide insights on key performance metrics across multiple marketplaces helps businesses identify trends, monitor sales performance, and make data-driven decisions to enhance their selling strategies and maximize their ROI.

7. Marketplaces solve the problem of International Expansion There are two ways to scale a business through international expansion:

• Either by expanding within a marketplace to its international extensions.
• Or by expanding onto an entirely new marketplace in a different region. Scaling on local marketplaces that have an international presence is often a logical choice for international expansion. This is because in this situation, merchants already know how the platform works and most likely have the infrastructure in place, including the technology used.

CONCLUSION

In conclusion, I emphasize that having a presence in a marketplace is more than useful for your online business, as long as you assess the cost, exposure, inventory, and risk components. The trust given by consumers to the marketplace automatically extends to the merchants present on the platform because marketplaces have authority and a brand built over time and with significant marketing budgets, from which merchants can indirectly benefit. This is also the reason why marketplaces impose clear rules on merchants regarding conduct, offer presentation, and delivery.

A marketplace is also a favorable environment for testing new products. The large number of active customers purchasing from marketplaces helps merchants test products and their sales potential without major investments in inventory or marketing.

Take advantage of a good multichannel selling software that will allow you to:

✔️ Bulk upload and list products simultaneously on the marketplaces where you have a seller account;

✔️ Increase control by automatically synchronizing stocks and bulk updating prices across all channels;

✔️ Resize images to meet the specific requirements of each marketplace;

✔️ Centralize all orders in one place, generate invoices and shipping labels in bulk;

✔️ Reduce manual work through automation by up to 90%;

✔️ Decrease return rates by accessing automated SMS and email notifications;

✔️ Generate product feeds directly from easySales for partners.

Test easySales platform for free 14 days, and create an account. A dedicated team is at your disposal, step by step, assisting you with the onboarding process and providing guidance on streamlining and automating your marketplace listings.