Tips for More Effective Multichannel eCommerce: Selling to Different Customers on Different Marketplaces

To reach your full potential as an eCommerce seller, you must leverage the use of various channels. While you want shoppers coming to your site, you’ll also want to make sure that your products are available where your target customers like to shop. A multichannel strategy is now commonplace in the realm of eCommerce, with more and more retailers looking to sell anywhere to sell more. 

There is certainly an abundance of great marketing strategies to consider for your eCommerce store, but one of the most important is to list your products on multiple online marketplaces. You can use these different marketplaces to get in front of many different customers. 

Some of the Top eCommerce Marketplaces

There are many different channels available for eCommerce selling, but here are some of the top ones to consider:

• Amazon: Amazon has over 95 million unique visitors each month, and 112 million Prime subscribers. Just based on the sheer number of shoppers Amazon attracts, it’s a platform that can really help you sell. 
• eBay: Similar to Amazon, eBay has a huge customer base. Its simple interface makes listing and selling easy, and it’s especially beneficial for international eCommerce. 
• Walmart: While Walmart was known for its physical locations, they’ve expanded into eCommerce and are looking to compete with Amazon in many ways. Walmart.com may not yet have quite the online presence of an Amazon or eBay yet, it’s a promising place to sell and it could be a huge advantage to get in before it blows up more. 
• Etsy: Etsy is geared towards hand-crafted, vintage, or artisanal items, making it ideal to target shoppers interested in those items. 

Choose the Best Channels for Your Business

Aside from the channels listed above, there are dozens of more options for online marketplaces. The fact is that not every channel will be ideal for your business. To effectively sell on multiple channels, you must select the channels that make the most sense for your business. For example, if your business does not sell hand-crafted or artisanal items, then Etsy probably won’t make sense for you. 

Some considerations for choosing the best channels for your business include:

• ROI. You’ll want to examine your potential ROI when considering time-spent and fees associated with hosting your items on the various platforms. Each marketplace has its own fees and you’ll want to consider the fees when choosing a channel. 
• Consumer behavior. We’ll dive into this soon, but you will have to think about YOUR ideal audience and their behavior. This will help you determine which channels to pursue. 
• Competition. For a channel to be effective for you, you’ll need to be able to compete on price and uniqueness. While Amazon offers a ton of exposure, it’s also very competitive, especially for certain products. For non-unique items, you’ll need to be able to compete on price. Even if you choose to pursue one of these marketplaces with highly competitive items, you should consider which of your products to list there. 

Understand Your Target Customers

Knowing where and how to sell comes down to understanding your ideal customer. You’ll need to pay close attention to customer traffic and create detailed customer profiles based on real data. Some ways to do this include:

• Following targeted customers on social media to learn about them. 
• Learning about the latest technology and eCommerce trends. 
• Asking for customer feedback. Try to learn about what they value and how they shop. 

Adjust Your Multichannel Selling Strategy 

The bottom line is that your multichannel selling decisions should be based on your customers. You can take what you learn back to your own site to tailor it to your customers, but you should also use this information to determine which marketplaces to sell on. For example, if you realize that many of your customers have a home voice assistant device (Alexa, Google, etc), then you’ll want to optimize your listings for voice search on the associated platforms. If you find out a large percentage of your ideal customers are Prime members, then it will be important to be an Amazon Prime seller. 

Getting onto the right channels is important, but leveraging them is even more important. Some standards apply to every channel, like that you should have accurate, detailed listings and high-quality photos. However, the buyers and expectations of each channel differ. In addition to examining your customers as a whole, you’ll also want to learn about how people shop on each channel. Maybe your younger customers like to shop directly on social media, whereas your older customers prefer to use Amazon. You’ll need to leverage this information to tailor your strategies to the different customers you have on different channels. 

Simplify Multichannel Selling

Multichannel selling can quickly become overwhelming, especially when you consider the different types of customers you may have on different channels. Make it easy to sell everywhere with Listing Mirror. Our #1 multichannel listing software simplifies the process of selling on multiple channels with listing management, order fulfillment, inventory syncing, and warehouse management features. We also have integrations with all major online marketplaces, so you can sell everywhere. To learn more about how Listing Mirror can help your eCommerce business, try us out for yourself with a free 14-day trial.

Start Your Free 14-Day Trial Today!