How to Choose the Best Marketplace for Your Products

How to Choose the Best Marketplace for Your Products

You’re surfing the web on your lunch hour when you read a story about an online seller increasing retail sales by more than 1,000%...by simply listing products on new channels. Once the initial disbelief fades away, you read through the case study again and think to yourself, “Wow, what I wouldn’t do to get growth like that.”

Of course, listing products on new marketplaces isn’t enough on its own. Even rocking the socks off the competition with your enriched data and optimized product listings isn’t enough. No—you still have to get under the noses of those consumers most interested in your product. And a big factor feeding into that is which marketplaces you load your product to in the first place.

Identifying the best marketplaces for your brand involves weighing each platform’s requirements, product categories, and audiences all at once. All you need is a little upfront research, and then you can make the smartest call for your business.

If adding another bullet point like “research top marketplaces” to your list makes your heart pound a little too hard, don’t sweat it! We’ll actually be going over the key considerations in detail right here.

 First: What Is an Online Marketplace?

Before we get into the weeds comparing marketplaces, let’s define what they are. Some of the best-known online marketplaces are:

  • Amazon

  • Wayfair

  • HomeDepot

  • Walmart

  • Lowes

  • Houzz

  • Hayneedle

  • Overstock

For those sellers who want to look beyond these most popular sites, depending on what products they sell, there are also countless niche online marketplaces to choose from. Bonanza, Fruugo and Fullbeauty are all examples. In fact, today there are over 100 high-traffic marketplaces you could leverage. Not bad!

Of course, that also means you have a lot to consider when picking the right marketplaces. You don’t, however, have to launch on all the marketplaces you’re a fit for. Pick a few instead, and you’ll do a better job optimizing listings there than if you spread yourself too thin. And even if you do have a short list of marketplaces you’d like to be present on, you don’t have to go after all of them at once.

B2B or B2C?

This will be an open-and-shut answer for most. Will you be focusing your listings on business-to-business marketplaces, or on business-to-consumer ones? What we mean is, do you sell primarily to other businesses? Or to consumers?

There are devoted marketplaces today that serve each of these groups. And it’s to your benefit to leverage the right ones.

Many of the most popular marketplaces like Amazon and eBay also have B2B and B2C versions of their site.

If you do have a B2B sales model, you might think, “Everyone goes to those B2C sites, anyway, why don’t I just stick to those?” That thinking is tempting, but there are many beneficial features that are more common on B2B sites that you don’t want to miss out on, like:

1.    Easily applying bulk orders

2.   Simpler quantity discounts

3.   System for providing quotes and RFPs

4.   Special pricing customer-by-customer

5.   Accessing additional payment types, like bank transfers

To learn more about B2B marketplaces, contact us. Over the rest of this article, we’re going to focus on the primary stomping grounds for brands: B2C marketplaces.

Retail or Resale?

Another big differentiator between popular marketplaces is whether they sell new products or resell used products. There are also entire marketplaces devoted to rentals, which we could devote a whole article to. But that’s for another day.

Retail marketplaces have the biggest demand. Their seemingly magnetic quality in bringing sellers together provides consumers with a faster and simpler purchasing process than ever before, especially with the rapid delivery spearheaded by Amazon and other retail giants.

To understand the different consumer experience across retail and resale markets, compare Amazon to Ebay Classified. (Amazon is a retail marketplace (primarily), and Ebay is a resale marketplace.)

Know Your Buyer

Once you’ve whittled down the kind of marketplace you’re best to consider, the most important remaining question becomes: Where are your buyers shopping?

This kind of avatar insight requires years of big data or hands-on research done through avatar interviews or a third-party research firm. Some marketplaces will have the sheer volume of visitors that sounds appealing—for example, Amazon, Ebay, and Walmart represent close to 500,000,000 active monthly visitors alone—but other marketplaces will have exactly the visitors best primed to buy your products. That’s a significant consideration.

Knowing how to identify your target avatar starts with getting clear on the characteristics of that person. Read about what we’ve seen in recent consumer trends and think about what additional research you could access to get to know your future buyer.

Know Your Competition

Search for the types of products you sell. Where is the competition? Are they selling on Amazon or on Etsy? Home Depot or Walmart? Be sure to focus on the general product category and not on your competitors by name. For example, if you sell home furnishings, just type in “home furnishings to buy.” Some of your competitors might not be online yet (or not have much of a presence), and so focusing on the product category will ensure you don’t have any blind spots with the competition that’s out there now.

Once you do find where your competition is selling, that marketplace is probably a good place for you to be, too. Of course, you could also argue that electing totally different marketplaces where you don’t see as much competition can mean the advantage of you “owning” that product space. Just be sure that the marketplace’s audience is the one you’re after.

What’s Next?

Once you identify your list of marketplaces you should be on, take a deep breath. You’ve done good work. And remember, you don’t have to launch your brand on all those platforms at once!

Rolling out your e-commerce plan can be simplified even more with product information management software (PIM) to store all your data in one centralized place. It’s also through using your PIM that you can streamline adding product data to whatever marketplaces are right for you. The result? You can be up and running on those marketplaces in weeks instead of months. Sign up for a demo today!

 
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Alex Borzo

Writer at Amber Engine

A brand can only communicate with messaging behind it, and that's where Alex Borzo comes in. A digital content marketer with a decade of experience, Alex's expertise shines in the research and writing she does for dozens of clients. When she connected with Amber Engine, it was a natural fit—AE had ambitious plans to provide their audience with even more valuable content to win in ecommerce, and Alex's background working with SaaS innovators positioned her to jump right in. The result? Brands and distributors are now discovering AE and all the best tactics to get to Amazon and other online marketplaces in weeks instead of months.

 
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