3 Multichannel Tips to Improve Marketplace Performance

Choosing to adopt a multichannel selling strategy is a great step forward for your business, but it comes with a series of new obstacles you have to tackle. The largest is playing favorites. It’s hard to not play favorites when it comes to your selling channels, especially when one is your own webstore.

Keeping a consistently high conversion rate on your own webstore is definitely important, but neglecting your other channels can be a costly mistake. If you’re selling on a marketplace like Amazon, you have a ton of opportunity to take advantage of, so why not take it? After all, Amazon has over 300 million active customers, and that’s a lot of potential for your store’s business.

Your channels need to build each other up instead of competing against one another. Here are a couple of easy-to-implement tips that can make a big impact on your marketplace performance:

Cross-Channel Promotion

Most retailers have links to their social accounts at the bottom of each page of their website, and many have store locators to help shoppers find a brick and mortar location closest to them. Why not use this space to link to your marketplace account? It gives shoppers a new path to visit your store and purchase your products.

Another effective way to promote your store is with your email receipts. There are plenty of tactics you can use with these emails to incentivize customers to shop with you again. This includes product recommendations, discounts, and more. But try throwing in a promotion code for your marketplace store. It will encourage shoppers to visit your shop and help you improve your marketplace sales.

Respect Price Parity

Regardless of whether it’s a webstore or a marketplace, your brand is still being represented. Therefore, you have to make sure the shopping experience is the same on every channel. This is especially true when it comes to your prices. Maintaining price parity across all of your channels is a great way to respect your brand’s image.

If your price is lower on one channel, then it will probably begin to earn more sales than the other. This can be disastrous for your marketplace presence, as many marketplaces include price parity clauses within their terms and conditions. Failure to respect these conditions can result in suspensions or even terminations, so don’t risk it. Adopting a tool like ChannelAdvisor can help you manage your channels to make sure they’re compliant and up to par.

Make the Most Out of a Bad Situation

No retailer is perfect, and often times their store is riddled with potholes that can disrupt a customer’s shopping experience. This can include out of stock situations. In the event you are out of a product, provide a link to your marketplace store. If you use a service like FBA, odds are the separate warehouse will be carrying the item your shopper is looking for.

Stitch Labs reported that free shipping can boost revenue by 10%. If you can’t afford to offer free shipping on your own store, let a marketplace like Amazon do the heavy lifting. If someone has an order value that doesn’t fit the free shipping threshold, encourage them to visit your marketplace store, where a Prime membership could provide free shipping for the shopper.

By dividing your attention equally between your channels, you can improve your store and help shoppers experience your brand consistently throughout the retail landscape. Using your channels to improve your overall brand image is a great way to improve your brand image in 2016. Wiser can help you manage your pricing across multiple channels. Connect with us today!