Marketplaces are seeking strategies to onboard quality sellers, improve the user experience for various sites, and increase the conversion rate for their sellers in the ever-growing e-commerce industry. In order to sell better, vendors are constantly adding their own stores and products to these marketplaces. Good content is something that both sellers and markets require.
With the twentieth-first century holding a fair share of innovations with it, online commerce is perhaps one of the most used. And this article focuses on one of the several challenges faced in virtual trade.
What makes e-commerce popular is the indefinite number of choices it offers, which consequently makes managing them all quite a huge task.
Dropshipping is quickly becoming a viable alternative to online commerce. 7 out of 10 people prefer dropshipping rather than selling directly on marketplaces. According to experts, “the primary reasons sellers leave marketplaces are a lack of equitable opportunities, a lack of seller education, and a lack of seller support.”
The e-commerce ecosystem will suffer greatly when vendors abandon marketplaces in favor of dropshipping. Lesser vendors will result in a monopoly of a few, and a lack of competition will force prices up and customer experience worse. Sellers are losing money in modern times because marketplaces provide almost no assistance. Due to a lack of knowledge in catalog design, management, and enhancement, products are being returned, forcing sellers to pay for shipment and reverse shipping.
We have seen a major shift in how the world shops during the last two decades. A rising percentage of consumers choose to shop online on their laptops and cellphones rather than in local stores or major shopping malls.
E-commerce is a thriving industry with yearly sales in the trillions, according to some estimates, and it continues to take a larger share of the retail market. According to the US Census Bureau, e-commerce increased from 6.2 percent to 7 percent of retail sales from the first quarter of 2014 to the first quarter of 2015. In India, e-retail commerce’s market share is expected to increase from 0.9 percent in 2015 to 1.4 percent in 2018, for a total of $17.5 billion.
What are the most typical issues that sellers face?
Pass Rate Is Low
Sellers are unable to have their catalog or listing approved, and a lack of seller support is causing the onboarding process to be delayed. With each passing day, the competition gains traction, rendering these sellers obsolete.
Interference with Brands
With desperate vendors manipulating marketplaces into ranking their products higher by changing attribute values or presenting false information, honest sellers are losing ground. Brand interference is another issue that makes it difficult for legitimate merchants to survive.
All of these seemingly insignificant issues are having a significant impact on sellers, and marketplaces must pay attention and provide unparalleled seller assistance. With marketplaces committing to assist sellers, practically all of these issues will be resolved, transforming these marketplaces into a level playing field.
Catalog Administration
Many of these internet vendors are store owners and wholesalers with no prior experience selling online. The fear of losing their business to online marketplaces is motivating them to sell online. They are in a difficult scenario due to a lack of catalog development, management, and enhancement help. They are failing to upload their products correctly, missing attribute values are harming their rankings, and a poor catalog is contributing to rising return rates.
The Seller Onboarding Procedure
One of the primary reasons why sellers struggle to succeed on e-commerce marketplaces is ambiguous seller onboarding processes. E-commerce players can make their sellers more comfortable by investing in improving the seller onboarding process. E-commerce companies can influence a seller’s journey by exploiting the onboarding place to introduce sellers to various intricacies of selling online.
Inventory mismanagement costs a trillion dollars each year and can be caused by overselling, overstocking, and other problems. Inventory difficulties frequently get exaggerated when numerous channels are involved, and sellers must ensure that inventory is accurately synced across all of them.
When you have one item posted on many channels, you may find yourself keying in the same thing over and over again when you want to make a little update or create a new listing. This not only leads to burnout but also allows for human error.
Listing and rating – Each e-commerce marketplace has its own method of categorizing, sorting, and ranking sale items. Many online sellers become overly focused on learning the rules of engagement for their principal sales channel (often Amazon) and neglect to learn them for others, putting them in danger of losing money.
Demand forecasting – When selling on numerous sites, you must have enough inventory to satisfy all orders. However, projecting how many sales you’ll make is difficult because you’ll have to account for different lead times, production costs, and storage fees.
E-commerce is never still. Similarly, marketplaces are constantly updating their algorithms and listing requirements to improve their platforms’ shopping experience. Many vendors today do not have an efficient, scalable solution for this, and their businesses are disrupted when a channel changes anytime abruptly.
Why is Seller Management Important in E-commerce?
According to a recent study, more than half of Amazon’s vendors also sell on other marketplaces. A large number of merchants are abandoning marketplaces in favor of dropshipping and individual businesses. As vendors continue to leave online stores, the relevance of e-commerce seller management in grows.
Marketplaces must adhere to global seller management standards or risk losing market share to the competition. Some of the most compelling reasons to prioritize in e-commerce seller management include:
To ensure the availability of new assortments, government regulations prohibit e-commerce stores from selling a large number of products on their own. No monopoly and healthy competition.
Best Seller management in E-commerce Practices to Follow:
Catalog Centralization
Having all of your product data in one place is the most straightforward way to manage your multi channel listings. This creates a single point of contact for your team. It also saves you the time and effort of having to enter into each marketplace separately to put a product for sale or perform (what should be) basic tasks.
Aside from that, you should be able to manage your inventory, analytics, and other key tools from a centralized spot (such as your WMS). This is feasible with a multichannel e-commerce platform that guarantees your apps communicate with one another.
Multichannel systems’ capabilities, as well as the channels they support, can vary substantially.
Buyer’s Opinion
When sellers diligently obey the many regulations of an online marketplace, they gradually begin to move up in search results. A vendor who meticulously follows the marketplaces’ paradigm will see a slow and long-term climb in ranks. While the outcomes are certain, rank advancement takes time.
Some merchants are impatient to reach the top and increase sales, so they take shortcuts. They engage in behaviors that are not permitted in order to rank better, hence lowering the ranking of other real dealers.
Leverage Kits and Bundles
Price parity is important in many markets these days. In other words, your channel may conceal your listing if it discovers that your goods can be obtained at a much lesser price on any other site (whether from you or another seller) (whether from you or another seller).
Experiment with multipacks and bundled products to get around this limitation while also increasing your average order value (AOV). These enable you to list your products as separate SKUs with varying pricing points.
Kits and bundles both provide a competitive advantage. Customers will feel like they are getting more value for their money and maybe more ready to try new products when they are combined with their preferred ones.
Other approaches to prevent price-parity violations include just presenting a section of your collection on certain channels.
Onboarding of Sellers
If online marketplaces actually want to provide a good consumer experience and obtain referrals, they should try to have as many quality merchants as possible. Marketplaces can successfully provide their committed customer’s multiple options by aggressively pursuing seller onboarding. The likelihood of meeting consumer requirements grows with each seller added. These vendors can be vetted further on many quality aspects to ensure that only high-quality products are given to clients.
Purchase a Good Inventory System
As previously said, inventory can quickly become out of control when you have many e-commerce channels to monitor. Unlike physical stores, your online channels are open 24 hours a day, seven days a week, posing new inventory management issues.
Other aspects, such as selling finished goods or overseeing the full production process, will influence your inventory system requirements. At the very least, you’ll require something that syncs your inventory across all of your channels.
This means that if an order comes in through any channel at any moment, your system will know to reserve the appropriate amount of stock and subtract it from the available quantities on other channels.
Ecommerce marketplace administration necessitates juggling a plethora of diverse tasks, requirements, and tactics at the same time. Fortunately, the suggestions above can assist in lightening your load.
The e-commerce boom is here, and everyone wants a piece of the action. While some go through the laborious process of catalog creation, maintenance, enhancement, and shipment to get the necessary monetary rewards, others rely solely on fraud. Everyone who relies on deception is harming the experience of legitimate merchants, causing sellers to be uneasy.
Now is the ideal time for online marketplaces to invest in seller management and prevent them from disappearing. Online marketplaces can generate revenue while also providing a superior consumer experience by increasing the number of real merchants and decreasing the number of phoney sellers.