How can you get started on marketplaces using a PIM?

Marketplaces represent a major growth opportunity for retailers looking to reach a wide customer base. According to Digital Commerce 360, marketplaces are expected to generate over 3,800 billion dollars in turnover by 2024 (representing a 9.95 per cent increase compared to 2023).

This shows that marketplaces are not about to lose momentum and that consumers are still keen to take advantage of the offers on these online platforms. You are probably familiar with well-known marketplaces such as Amazon, Cdiscount and eBay. According to an analysis carried out by Semrush, these three platforms feature in the top three of the 25 most popular e-commerce sites in France in 2020. These marketplaces therefore represent a very attractive growth opportunity for e-retailers, whether operating in a specific market or across several simultaneously.

In this article, we’ll show you how to list your products for sale on marketplaces, using the right tools.

Why use marketplaces?

There are several advantages for a business in launching on a marketplace:

1. Marketplaces are excellent platforms for rapidly increasing the visibility and brand awareness of your brand and products. They attract significant traffic, giving sellers the opportunity to reach a wider audience – or, conversely, a highly targeted one – at a lower cost.

2. Speaking of costs, save money! The exorbitant prices associated with setting up e-commerce sites are driving many brands to turn to marketplaces. This solution even allows lesser-known brands to showcase and sell their products without incurring high costs.

3. Minimise risk. Marketplaces offer the chance to test new markets and assess your business’s readiness before investing in new market share.

4. Diversify your sales channels. If you have other sales channels, marketplaces fit perfectly into your omnichannel sales strategy.

5. Aim for international expansion. As online platforms, marketplaces know no borders. They offer the opportunity to conquer new markets across the globe.

Marketplaces offer numerous benefits and are suitable for all types of sellers, whether private individuals or businesses. However, they require a well-defined strategy from the outset to ensure a positive return on investment (ROI) and an optimal customer experience.

Seller profiles

Marketplaces are structured around connecting buyers and sellers. It is therefore possible to sign up as either a buyer or a seller.

Professional sellers thus have a dedicated platform at their disposal, such as Amazon Seller Central on the world’s largest marketplace. Indeed, this profile provides access to a comprehensive back-office system, helping e-retailers to manage their business directly on the platform.

These centralise a wide range of information, such as:

• Product listings: list your products on the platform and edit your product listings directly from the marketplace’s back-office
• Stock levels: all orders and information about your stock are available directly via the platform. The aim is to gain an overview of your current and future stock levels, as well as a daily, near-real-time view
• Customers: a wide range of features power the marketplace back office, enabling you to understand your customers’ search intentions, analyse their experience with your products, collect their reviews, and access much more information
• Support: most marketplaces offer support designed to assist sellers with their distribution efforts
• Reporting: Furthermore, a wide range of reporting features are available, enabling you to manage your marketplace operations with precision, particularly through customised reports

Products

There are several ways to approach selling on marketplaces.

Firstly, this approach may constitute your entire e-commerce business, meaning that your products are available only on one or more marketplaces. This, in particular, avoids the need for you to develop your own e-commerce website. However, this can make your offering seem impersonal and undermine the trust of visitors who are unfamiliar with your business or brand.

Alternatively, you can adopt a multi-channel or omni-channel strategy by offering your products on several platforms: your own website and marketplaces.

It is very important to decide in advance which model you wish to adopt, as they require different levels of effort. Indeed, if you choose to sell only on marketplaces, your products can be uploaded directly to the platform. On the other hand, if you already have a centralised product range on an online shop, you’ll need to synchronise your current range in order to offer it on marketplaces. This is known as product syndication.

Product content syndication

Product content syndication software is available to help you manage the distribution of your products across marketplaces, as well as their promotion via your chosen channels.

These tools help you automate the distribution of information from your product listings across all your distribution and communication channels. Such software may consist of tools specifically designed for syndication, or may take the form of PIM (Product Information Management) or DAM (Digital Asset Management) systems.

This saves you a great deal of time in your development process, making it easier to publish your product listings on other platforms such as marketplaces and minimising the risk of human error.

Why synchronise product information across marketplaces?

When expanding onto marketplaces, visitors viewing your product listings must receive the same level of information as those on your e-commerce site. This means that all information must be consistent and must effectively address the same queries.

Using PIM software allows you to centralise all product-related information and edit it within a single platform. This information flow is then shared across all your distribution and communication channels. Maintaining control over the quality of your product information benefits your business, theoretically optimising your conversion rates, regardless of the channels you use.

Which marketplaces should you choose?

The choice of marketplaces on which to expand depends entirely on your objectives. Ask yourself the right questions, taking into account your product range and the strategies employed by competitors in the market.

To answer the question “which marketplaces should you choose?”, you need to adopt a user-centred approach. Which marketplaces are your customers likely to visit? You should adopt a binary approach, considering both generalist and specialist marketplaces.

The former generate a lot of traffic, though this is less targeted in relation to your products. The latter, however, being more focused on your product range, are better suited to your needs and can generate traffic that is more likely to purchase your company’s products.

You therefore need to strike the right balance between acquisition and conversion. Is it better to achieve high visibility with low conversion rates? Or to attract a select group of highly qualified visitors to your product listings on marketplaces?

How does PIM facilitate and optimise your presence on marketplaces?

Without a strategy, launching on marketplaces can quickly become a tedious task! As well as being highly competitive, each one has its own criteria regarding content, image formats, and mandatory or optional information… This can quickly become time-consuming, lead to errors and even put you off.

On top of that, expanding into new marketplaces means you need to consider:

• Further adapting or enriching product data,
• Complying with the required formats on a case-by-case basis,
• Generating new formats of product photographs,
• Ensuring updates are made as the product catalogue is constantly evolving.

Fortunately, there is a PIM (Product Information Management) solution that will help you optimise and streamline your experience on marketplaces.

PIM centralises your entire product catalogue. It is compatible with all marketplaces and allows you to define, in advance, the rules for transmitting product data by adapting the product listing to their requirements. These may include:

• A maximum number of characters for the text description,
• The selection of required or optional fields,
• Resizing images to meet the marketplace’s requirements,
• Customised catalogue display for each selected marketplace.

Once these rules are in place, any changes made and validated on the PIM’s product pages automatically update their equivalents on each marketplace. There’s no longer any need to ensure that product pages are updated on every marketplace!

Even in a multi-brand environment, if your company manages a portfolio of several brands, each offering different products on different marketplaces, the PIM simplifies product data management by optimising processes.

Download the ebook