Running an ecommerce business has its challenges. To stay ahead of competitors and survive a saturated market, you need to keep pace with new ecommerce trends and know how to use them to your advantage.
In this article, you’ll learn what a marketplace integration is and how you can leverage the opportunities it offers to grow your ecommerce business.
What is a marketplace?
A marketplace is a multi-vendor platform that offers services to facilitate goods exchange between different sellers and their potential customers. Marketplaces appeared around two decades ago, and have been rapidly gaining recognition by making shopping faster and more convenient than ever before.
Why are marketplaces so popular?
There are a few reasons why marketplaces now play a leading role in ecommerce.
Marketplaces are large platforms that have established business processes over the course of the whole sales cycle. Excellent inventory management, payment processing, refund policy, and of course, a large variety of products offered are the key factors that contribute to the success of marketplaces in the long term.
Well-known ecommerce giants like Amazon, Walmart, Etsy, and Google Marketplaces have established reputations and gained millions of customers over time.
What is a marketplace integration?
A marketplace integration is the process of getting an ecommerce store connected to marketplaces in order to sell on them. Marketplaces can greatly contribute to the success of your ecommerce business if you use what the integration can offer wisely.
Let’s see what an ecommerce marketplace integration can provide to you as an ecommerce business owner.
Reach new sales channels and grow your customer base
Marketplaces feature a wide range of options to choose from by gathering many sellers in one place and allowing them to present their products. Millions of visitors will be able to see what you have to offer if the items you sell are listed.
Promote your brand faster and build a reputation with smaller investments
Small ecommerce businesses often have a hard time promoting their products or services and building a loyal customer base. Ecommerce giants add this much needed layer of trust to online shopping — listing your items on known marketplaces can help you increase your brand exposure significantly.
Make use of established marketplace technology
As we discussed, popular marketplaces have established best practices for payment processing, logistics, and inventory management. By integrating your ecommerce business with known marketplaces you can take advantage of technology that has proven its worth over the years.
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Marketplace integration examples
There are certain ways you can integrate an online business with marketplaces. The main goal of a marketplace integration with your existing ecommerce business is to get products exposed to a larger audience. But even if you are running a small blog, and do not currently have any products or services to sell, you can still make use of the integration. Let’s see how.
Affiliate programs
Large marketplaces offer affiliate programs to boost sales and attract even more visitors. Marketplace affiliates can earn a percentage of revenue on sales that result from adding affiliate links to certain products from marketplaces and other content on your website. This type of a marketplace integration does not require much time and effort to start, and can help you monetize your blog.
Using ecommerce infrastructure
Selling products, even in the B2B ecommerce sector, often requires investing in infrastructure to ensure smooth payment processing, product shipping, and customer service. Sellers can take advantage of ecommerce infrastructures the largest marketplaces have built.
For example, integration with Amazon allows you to leverage marketplace technologies for payment processing and inventory management.
Listing products
Listing products on the largest marketplaces is an ecommerce integration method that is considerably time consuming. However, having your products available both on your online store and on marketplaces like Google Shopping or Amazon can boost your sales and greatly increase the brand value.
The main goal of having products listed on marketplaces is to create real-time synchronization to automatically update product information and inventory quantity to ensure consistency across all channels.
How to set up a marketplace integration for your store
Setting up an ecommerce marketplace integration for your store consists of three steps: getting a marketplace seller account, choosing the best integration software, and actually getting your products in front of a larger audience. Let’s dive into the process.
Step 1: getting a marketplace seller account
The first thing you need to do is create a seller account on the chosen marketplace. Creating an account does not take much time, but requires providing your business information.
Marketplaces usually offer a few different seller plans. Depending on how many items you expect to sell on the marketplace monthly, you can choose the plan that works for you. Often if you sell just a few items, you are charged per sale, while sellers that make big profits pay a fixed fee.
To get products listed on the marketplace, you may need to choose a more advanced plan, as basic ones do not give access to certain tools that allow establishing a connection from your store to the marketplace.
Step 2: choosing the best software
Once you have created your marketplace seller account, you need to choose the best software to establish the connection to the marketplace. You can typically choose from a few options, including software services and plugins. Costs vary greatly depending on the number of features included.
When we reviewed the best software to use to integrate your WooCommerce store with Amazon, we realized that there is no tangible difference between using a plugin and a software service.
However, most software services provide a single dashboard to control all your sales channels, which can be incredibly useful.
Step 3: listing products
Listing products is the final step you need to take to present your product to the marketplace audience and boost your sales. With the help of the chosen service or plugin, you will be able to do it easily — the process is highly automated and reliable.
You can create listings from multiple products or your entire catalog. Services feature real-time sync for all your connected sales channels, which means when any changes are made to products in your online store, everything is instantly reflected on all sales channels listings.
Anytime a product is sold from your website or any other sales channel, your inventory levels are also updated without delay.
Let’s review marketplace integration
Marketplace integration is something that can be incredibly useful for expanding the presence of your online store in the ecommerce world and growing your customer base.
With the growing popularity of online marketplaces, we can hardly find a better time to start. All it takes is creating a seller account on the marketplace and choosing the right integration software.
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