Online Marketplace 101: Effective Strategies to Sell More (Without Lowering Your Price)

Nowadays, online marketplaces have opened up a whole new frontier in the online business world that provides wide opportunities for retailers, but also wholesalers and some online entrepreneur. 

By taking the correct approach, online marketplaces can be a great platform for online sellers to actually make a very good business future. 

So what’s the first thing that comes to mind when someone talks about online selling? 

I bet it can’t run away from Lazada, Shopee, Prestomall.

Well, you are right. These are the online marketplace that allow you to list your products on their website and sell. For many reasons to sell on marketplace, one of it is that marketplaces allow you to get exposed to a large customer base without doing any extra heavy-lifting to acquire the customers. 

For that, many have ventured into selling on various marketplaces instead of just one marketplace, maximizing the reach of their products to the mass customers. 

The Multichannel Selling in One Place

Couldn’t agree more than increasing the revenue of your business in venturing in multiple marketplaces. But there are drawbacks too when you are selling on multiple marketplaces - you will have to fulfill your orders SEPARATELY. 

Imagine you have the same product that has orders from at least 3 marketplaces, you will have to log into each of the marketplace's platforms to fulfill the orders, how tedious is that...  

The idea of online is to bring convenience to both buyers and sellers. Therefore, imagine if you can manage all your orders and fulfill them in one place. It’d saved up so much time. Besides, you won’t need to re-upload your product one by one to your marketplace again and again when you want to sell to multiple marketplaces. 

EasyStore is such kind of platform that helps in syncing your products to different marketplaces. And allowing you to manage all of your orders in your own website, so you do not have to go to each and every marketplace to fulfill and update your products again. 

Other Drawbacks of Selling In Just Marketplaces 

As mentioned above, the marketplace provides a large amount of customers group for you so you do not have to do extra marketing to get customers. However, the customers that buy from you are not exactly your customers, because they belong to the platform themselves. All you can get from them is just a phone number information for you to contact them. 

Therefore, you are unable to get the full information of your customers and you are unable to do target marketing to your customers. As CRM is very important in terms of running a business, customers’ information will be considered as one of the vital assets for an online business owner. 

Just like any other marketplaces in the real world. You will compare the price when you want to buy something. It works the same for the online marketplace, online sellers will have price competition with one another, where the lowest price merchant will win the race, even when you are selling non-homogeneous products. In turn, this will hurt your profit margin in the long run as you are always immersing yourself in the negative competition. 

So what can you do about this?

You might ask, “so how can I overcome this?”. Just like I mentioned above, what you want is an all-in-one platform to actually create your own customer group and build your own brand without any price competition from competitors if you are selling niche products. 

In EasyStore, we believe that branding is very important for every business. A good brand name not only can increase the Life-Time Value (LTV) of your customers and increase your repeat sales, it also helps you in building trust with the public and gain new customers to your website. 

Of course, you will want the best of both worlds, where you can have the traffics from marketplaces and the flexibility of having your own website. So here’s a little private tip where you can bring your customers from marketplace to your own website:

#Tips: You can put a little voucher code and insert it in your parcel whenever you dispatch your parcel to your customers after they placed an order with you in one of the marketplaces. In the voucher paper, include your own website and prompt them to purchase from you cheaper at your website.

This will lead to more repeat purchases and you will be able to have your own customers group as well. Thus, this is how you can connect your own website to the marketplace to maximize your profit margin. 

When you're selling across omnichannel, your business is ready to boost its performance with regular repeat customers.