Growth Hacking in Ecommerce: How To Discover (And Manage) Growth On Multiple Marketplaces
If you’re looking to scale up your business, there’s one best practice you can’t afford to overlook: Be where your customers are. Once you figure that out, you’ve discovered a growth channel.
For ecommerce sellers, this means having your products available to consumers across a number of leading and niche platforms—and not just the traditional ones. The way people shop online is continually evolving. Today potential shoppers encounter products not just on a business’s own branded website, but on social media, in apps, and on a growing number of differentiated marketplaces catering to their shopping style.
The bottom line is this: Being more places means more opportunities to reach new audiences, and more chances to increase sales. Each new channel your products are available on gives you a chance to access fresh audiences and find the platform where your product connects best.
But this doesn’t come without its challenges. It can be costly and time-consuming to create a business process for each channel, using valuable business resources, time and money to manually build and manage your business on each platform. That’s where managed solutions come in handy, and another best practice: centralizing operations with a product information management system and managed services.
That’s why MoreCommerce has partnered with ShipStation: To help you meet the challenges of OmniChannel selling.
MoreCommerce’s tools and services lower costs and consolidate work with synced product uploads across channels, synced inventory management, and a slew of other features that make easy work of a multi-platform presence. Together with ShipSation, you can get orders in from almost any channel with minimal effort, and ship seamlessly. Using this service lessens the cost of discovering your growth platforms by streamlining the work involved—creating a one-stop place to manage your business versus operating each platform in its own silo. It’s an affordable option that helps take the risk and additional labor out of testing channels. It also removes many of the headaches that come from manual management, like inventory quantity mix-ups and needing to make product information updates on each individual marketplace.
Google who? Shoppers are starting product searches on marketplaces.
Recent research indicates that 87% of shoppers begin their searches on digital channels. About a third of those shoppers are skipping Google and other engines altogether and beginning product searches on marketplaces like Amazon, Etsy, and eBay. That number continues to grow. If you’re not listing on those platforms, you could be losing out on valuable traffic and exposure.
Marketplaces invite trust for shoppers buying from an unfamiliar seller.
Making your products available on a shopper’s preferred marketplace makes them more likely to have trust in the transaction and in your product, compared to purchasing from a one-off brand site.
Making your products available on a shopper’s preferred marketplace makes them more likely to have trust in the transaction and in your product, compared to purchasing from a one-off brand site.
A presence on multiple marketplaces allows you to test which ones catapult growth.
Each marketplace offers its own audience, opening your products up to new shoppers you might not otherwise reach. By listing on a variety of platforms, you’ll drastically expand your reach and discover which are driving new sales and growth.
Business management tools consolidate the work of running a number of channels.
Manually joining and managing different platforms can end up costing a business a significant amount. One way to avoid this is to seek out tools and solutions that consolidate the work, allowing you to build just one business process instead of one for each channel. MoreCommerce’s Managed Market Solution allows you to upload products once and sync listings across the top marketplaces, manage inventory, and much more.
Adam Shahbaz is the VP of Business Development and Subscriptions at MoreCommerce, an Alibaba company. He’s a technology industry veteran with experience in ecommerce and media in growth businesses and at the enterprise level. More importantly, his focus is using data and analytics to decipher incremental value, separating causation from correlation. He’s directly responsible for the partnership solutions delivered by MoreCommerce, and he welcomes your feedback, criticisms, well-wishes, and ideas at [email protected]. When he’s not digging into the numbers, he’s usually in the mountains climbing rocks.
