Ecommerce Multichannel Selling Tips To Grow Your Business
As a leading top ecommerce order fulfillment company, our clients and online merchants often approach us about ecommerce multichannel selling and how it can help their business.
While online sellers do have questions about our multichannel order fulfillment abilities, they typically have questions concerning the migration from selling on a single channel versus selling on multiple channels.
There’s a vast number of key benefits when you sell on ecommerce multichannel platforms. However, you want to make sure your company is ready to make that transition and benefit from the opportunity at hand. Multichannel selling can make a drastic difference in your sales and growth, but it takes a strategic approach.
Let’s discuss a few ecommerce multichannel selling tips.
(1) Are You Ready To Go Multichannel?
It’s very tempting to want to launch your products in as many commerce channels as possible, but you want to make sure your company is ready for it first. We know this is an exciting time for you and we want you to have a lot more sales, but be cautious.
Here’s the concern: When you launch new campaigns, how many times does it work just like you imagined? You don’t have to answer that, we both know. Campaigns take time to get dialed in and there’s always a lot of testing in the beginning.
This includes capturing data, analyzing data, product optimization, optimizing sources, sales, marketing, even your order fulfillment strategy. The last thing you want is to launch an ecommerce mutlichannel campaign and find yourself catching up or worse, failing.
(2) Before You Go Multichannel, Ask Yourself These
Here’s a few questions we recommend asking before you launch ecommerce multichannel.
- Should you go ecommerce multichannel with a few select products or your entire product catalog?
- How do you plan to generate traffic to your new product listings?
- How do you plan to keep your branding consistent across your ecommerce multichannel network?
- Will there be pricing strategies implemented across different channels?
- Do you plan to have the same order fulfillment strategy across all channels?
- What’s your customer service strategy for your new ecommerce multichannel approach?
You would likely be mistaken if you think you can approach ecommerce multichannel selling with a one-for-all approach or strategy. Each selling channel is unique and should be treated as such.
Let’s use a good example. Let’s say you have one channel that sees a big rise in demand. Due to your order fulfillment process, you can’t keep up with the demand. In this scenario, the damage is already done, customers are not getting their orders in time, the negative reviews begin to add up and your customer service is overwhelmed with complaints.
This scenario can happen overnight if you’re not properly prepared. This is why it’s vital to be “ready” when you go multichannel.
(3) Leveraging Amazon And Ebay
Once your primary selling channel is established, it’s time to start exploring the other ecommerce channels you can start leveraging to sell more products. Two of the best marketplaces to sell online is Amazon and Ebay.
At this point, this is a huge opportunity to grow your business. It’s important your working with a company like Thill who has decades of ecommerce multichannel selling experience. Let’s go ahead and point out the obvious.
Our order management software integrates seamlessly too, we have an Amazon ecommerce integration, an Ebay ecommerce integration too.
The Audience Of Buyers
Both Amazon and Ebay has a huge audience of motivated buyers, two ecommerce channels that can change your business overnight. Here’s what we want you to think about, imagine how your business could grow listing your products on Amazon? Ebay?
The Marketing Is Free
While there’s nothing in the world that is completely free, both Amazon and Ebay do a great job marketing their products. Both Amazon and Ebay rank great in Google for a wide range of keyword terms. If your products have a lot of search volume and the two platforms rank well for your keyword strings, you can instantly benefit from having your products listed.
(4) Where Thill Can Help You
While Amazon and Ebay have a ton of upside, there’s also some downfalls to the two platforms. The great news, this is where Thill can help you dominate.
While you can use Amazon for your fulfillment, it can hurt your branding as they will ship your products out with their Amazon packaging. Even more, Amazon keeps the communication between them and your customers.
With a partner like Thill, we can handle both your order fulfillment and customer service.
(5) The Big Negative Using Amazon And Ebay
The biggest con for using these powerful marketplaces is the merchant fees. With Amazon, you can typically expect to pay a 15 percent fee while Ebay will cost you 10 percent fees.
Keep in mind though, fees can differ depending on your product category.
While that may deter some, you have to pay to play on these channels. That’s why working with a partner like Thill can help you navigate these big marketplaces.
(6) Nothing Stays The Same
For all of you third party sellers, you have to be aware that you’re playing on their terms, with their rules and what they say goes. Amazon, Ebay and other large marketplaces are always changing and adapting for their customers.
Every ecommerce marketplace has rules and guidelines they must follow. Just make sure you’re aware of this because things can change quickly.
(7) Other Ecommerce Channels You May Want To Consider
While Amazon and Ebay are certainly 2 of the biggest marketplaces online, there’s a number of different ecommerce channels you can use to sell your products and services.
Purchases On Google
Purchases On Google has been out for a few years and offers sellers a marketplace to sell their products.
Facebook is one of the top social media platforms online and they now have a marketplace for sellers.
YouTube
YouTube is the second largest social media platform and gives you the opportunity to run video ads to your target market.
(8) Be Ready To Scale
The last thing you want to do is to go head first into a new channel and flatline sales. If you do your due diligence (like you are now) and you have the right launch strategy, you’re going to have the opportunity to grow your business significantly. With that in mind, you must be ready to grow and scale. The question – are you ready to scale?
Inventory
If you see a rise in demand, do you have enough product to fulfill it? How long is your current turnaround times?
We know this is fulfillment basics but it’s important you’re ready. Proper inventory management is key to having ecommerce multichannel success.
Order Fulfillment
Order fulfillment plays a big role in ecommerce multichannel selling. Is your business ready to fulfill orders coming in from different ecommerce channels?
Is the order fulfillment process you have in place now going to be efficient enough to handle more sales? It may make more sense to outsource your order fulfillment, another area where Thill can help you.
The Right Order Management System
When you have multiple ecommerce channels, real-time tracking and analytics is going to be important to your success and management.
While we can’t speak for others, our order management software tracks all of your sells across your ecommerce multichannel platforms.
Customer Service
Do you have the customer support team you need for sales growth? Many online merchants and ecommerce sellers don’t have a big customer support team in place. This is an area where Thill can help you if you don’t. We have 125 customer support agents to help you with all of your customer care needs.
(9) What Do I Do Now?
It’s not hard to be successful on one ecommerce channel. When it comes to multiple channels, it’s a different ballgame.
Obviously, you care about your business and you’re interested in moving to new ecommerce channels or you wouldn’t find yourself reading this far.
We recommend jumping on a call and talking to one of our ecommerce multichannel selling experts. At the very least, we can give you some clarity and direction so you approach this opportunity correctly.
You can reach us directly at 1-920-967-9201 or you can use our contact form.
