Marketplaces are becoming more popular in the e-commerce industry. More and more businesses are inclined to sell on marketplaces, such as eBay and Amazon for a number of benefits they offer. In fact, marketplaces are expected to generate more than $3.5 trillion in sales by 2024. This multi-channel sales strategy ensures that your products reach to a wider audience, and ultimately generate more revenue.
Although marketplace is now more common, many retailers are still unaware about what exactly a marketplace is. From a customer perspective, a marketplace is an online store that enables customers to browse products from a number of sellers.
From a business perspective, a marketplace allows businesses to sell their products in a common storefront that may offer more reach than their dedicated online store. With this concept, customers can find an enormous range of products on a single platform, which no regular store can offer.
Today, the quality of data is a key element in increasing sales, whether it is your dedicated online store or you are selling on marketplaces. If you choose to sell on marketplaces, then your product information should not only meet the demand of your customers, but also multiple marketplaces that your customers favor.
This makes truly challenging for retailers as every marketplace has its own data format to manage. All these issues call for an efficient product information management system that is critical for the success of selling on marketplaces.
Let’s take a look at how a PIM can help you generate more revenue by selling on marketplaces.
How PIM Can Help Businesses Increase Their Sales on Modern Marketplaces
#1 Strategic placement of products
Marketplaces are a great platform for introducing your products in the market, especially when you are a new business. A PIM helps in placing the products strategically that drives traffic and increase your sales. It becomes easy to introduce new products quickly in the marketplaces, which not only boosts brand visibility, but also drive sales.
Moreover, these products can be placed with similar brands, giving you an advantage to showcase how your product is different from others in terms of pricing or features, and how it can benefit consumers.
#2 Data quality can help convert more customers
High quality of product data is important if you are looking to improve your conversion rates. Maintaining completeness, consistency and accuracy of product data prepare your brand to target customers on different channels. Because how and where the products are offered, there are different approaches and prices that need to be followed.
Multilingualism, which is a great feature offered by PIM, makes easy to market products in the localized language and currency, which enables you to offer tailored shopping experiences. A PIM helps you overcome customer experience challenges and create an emotional bond with your customers that eventually brings more sales.
#3 Data can be fed in the marketplace with ease
One of the common challenges when it comes to marketplace selling is that the data needs to be transformed according to its particular format and structure. For instance, Amazon has its own data format needs, while eBay has its own. This calls for a system to send as well as receive consistent product information from every marketplace.
A robust PIM ensures that the data are properly optimized and mapped for delivery to a number of marketplaces. When product data are properly mapped to the most relevant category, its discoverability by shoppers becomes easier.
#4 PIM supports faster product launches
Whether you are introducing new products in the market or launching existing products in new marketplaces, reducing time to market is crucial. It is a proven fact that early product launches enjoy clear advantages in terms of revenue, market share and sales growth.
PIM offers you a single point of truth that enables you to handle product data centrally in a consistent, unified and predictable way. When a new product campaign deadline approaches, your data will always be ready as required for the intended purpose.
#5 Increase your reach
One of the biggest benefits of selling on marketplaces is you get an opportunity to reach a wider audience and sell your products to more customers. With a PIM, it becomes easy for businesses to reach people beyond local boundaries and track orders through a unified dashboard.
PIM helps you overcome the barriers of currency, language and region, allowing you to broaden your market reach, create exceptional shopping experiences and boost your sales worldwide.
#6 Simplify multiple data systems and format management
The successful marketplace selling starts with understanding format variances between multiple marketplaces. So, the question is how a company would maintain its product catalogs, when the data are coming in diverse formats and there are so many data systems involved?
These different formats can make the product information prone to data redundancies, data repetition and obsolescence, which not only negatively impact the customer experience, but also hamper your sales.
With the right PIM, these issues can be resolved, allowing businesses to manage product data so it adapts to various formats and structures. PIM also allows you to centralize and consolidate product information in a single location. This, in turns, makes selling on multiple marketplaces simpler.
#7 Quick and efficient product data syndication
When working with multiple marketplaces, syndicating product data is one of the crucial things to do for any business. Today, product information management systems have made easy for brands to distribute data. Product data syndication is one excellent solution that enables retailers prepare their product information for a range of shopping channels and platforms.
PIM collects siloed product data from any type of source, then standardizes it and prepare it for the distribution in the right format and the right context. This ensures consistent product information is distributed across all marketplaces, delivering consistent shopping experiences.
Final Thoughts
Buyers don’t usually browse just one channel. They look for the same product on different channels in order to find the best deal. Thus, it becomes imperative to maintain consistent product information on all marketplaces. If customers find inconsistent and inaccurate product information between different channels, it can hamper their trust.
If prospective customers are not sure whether your product has desired feature or not, they will surely move to another marketplace vendor that has all the listing data correct. Even if the price is a little higher, they will shop from them and you will eventually end up losing a sale.
A high-end PIM, such as Pimcore and Akeneo can help you create personalized shopping experiences on marketplaces for your unique user demographics. These tools let you centralize and consolidate product information in a single repository, allowing to create a single point of truth and leaving no chances of inaccuracies and inconsistencies.
In simple words, a PIM can help online businesses sell effortlessly on marketplaces by allowing them to distribute every single detail about the products in the least possible time and in the most efficient way.
