There is a common practice among online sellers to start their business with a single sales channel, a website or marketplace, and then expanding to other sales platforms.
There are multiple sales channels you can explore and list your products on.
So why only use one if you can utilize many?
Multichannel Selling: Benefits & Challenges
More and more companies explore the idea of listing their products on various marketplaces and this trend is explained by board opportunities multichannel selling offers.
If you are still wondering whether such an approach is worthy of your attention, the following benefits will eliminate all doubts.
What is Multichannel Selling?
Multichannel selling is a popular business approach among eCommerce companies.
It is a practice of offering products on a variety of platforms and marketplaces, like Amazon or eBay.
The primary goal of operating on multiple sales channels is to scale your business and reach more potential customers.
Multichannel integration is beneficial both for customers and merchants.
Shoppers get a chance to buy products on the platforms of their own choice, while merchants reach a wider audience and increase their revenue.
Why Multichannel Integration is Important for eCommerce
Multichannel integration is a vital step for any business that wants to grow. Multichannel listing offers a few attractive advantages online retailers cannot ignore.
- Multichannel sellers interact with a huge number of customers
By creating an account on a marketplace like Amazon, which has almost 200 million monthly visitors, you are able to reach a broad audience.
When selling on your own online store, you can market your products only to customers that have found your online store.
At the same time, marketplaces attract more visitors due to the diversity of presented products.
For example, on Amazon, you can buy almost anything, from books to gadgets, and clothes. It results in more product views and potential customers you can interact with.
- Multichannel integration is a sure way to increase revenue
Marketplaces offer not only a greater product and brand visibility but provide an easy way to increase revenue.
When you sell products on your own website, you need to dedicate a lot of time and effort to marketing, SEO optimization, and promotion to make your store visible in search results.
When you list your products on a marketplace like Amazon, you automatically get access to millions of customers who might be searching for the products you sell.
It creates unlimited opportunities for you to sell more and earn more.
- Fast fulfillment and delivery of products
If you want to be an omnipresent brand, it is important to provide your customers with fast order fulfillment and delivery.
For example, Amazon offers the Fulfillment by Amazon (FBA) option.
The marketplace owns thousands of fulfillment centers which Amazon sellers can use when they are participating in the FBA program.
Products in the FBA category are available for customers with Amazon Prime shipping (2 Days, Next Day, Same Day delivery).
With your own store, it is quite challenging to provide the same customer experience.
The Main Challenges of Multichannel Online Sales
Multichannel retail business involves a few challenges merchants need to overcome:
- Migrating the whole product catalog
When sellers first add products to a new marketplace from an online store, they are often reluctant about adding all items from a catalog.
If we talk about hundreds of products, it takes quite a lot of time and effort to create listings for all of them.
- Inventory control and order management
When you sell on various marketplaces, it is important to keep an eye on all your listings, process orders, and inventory maintenance.
Overselling is the worst thing that can happen to sellers offering products on various marketplaces.
No seller wants to disappoint their customers, who, in case of such a situation, might never buy from your store again.
These tasks take a toll on your business and you start experiencing growth pains.
Tackling Challenges with Listing Automation Tools
Fortunately for the owners of multichannel eCommerce businesses, there are various seller tools that automate the most important processes and eliminate the above problems.
Sellbery is a multichannel listing tool that automatically synchronizes product listings, order, and inventory data between online stores and top marketplaces.
The platform helps to get the data from all sales channels in mere minutes.
Sellbery supports integration with the most popular eCommerce platforms that operate in 50+ countries worldwide.
The list of integrations includes such names as Amazon, eBay, Etsy, Shopify, Magento, WooCommerce and many more.
The multichannel sales platform simultaneously creates and updates product listings on various platforms.
If you upload new products on Amazon, they are automatically transferred to eBay.
Sign up now and market your products on the largest marketplaces worldwide.
As you can see, multichannel integration is very important for online sellers who want to reach a wider audience, improve product visibility across channels, get additional sales, and increase revenue.
Whether you are just starting out or owning an already established eCommerce business, multichannel selling is a worthy strategy to embrace.
This is a guest post by Sellbery.
