Pros and Cons of Multi-channel Online Selling
If you're an ecommerce seller, you know how important it is to be selling your products in different places to ensure growth for your business. But with postage, packing, admin, creating and everything else that comes with it, listing your products on different platforms becomes another thing to add to your never ending to do list.
This blog explores why multi-channel selling is essential for SMEs and how you can do it easily and quickly.
What is multi-channel online selling?
Multi-channel online selling is the process of an ecommerce retailer listing and selling their goods or products to their customers, through more than one sales marketplace or platform.
4 Benefits of multi-channel selling
1. Increase Sales
This is the ultimate goal of any ecommerce retailer – more sales = more profit.
By listing your products on multiple online marketplaces, they instantly become available to a broader range of customers and potential sales.
2. Brand Awareness
Multi-channel selling is great for brand exposure and brand awareness – by listing on the major ecommerce marketplaces such as eBay, Amazon and Argos, you have the chance to grow your customer base and sales opportunities.
People tend to have a platform preference and by listing on them all, you can reach all of your potential buyers.
3. Gain competitive advantage
Having your products available on multiple sales channels results in you products being in the mix alongside your competitors, while also potentially listing your items on channels that your competitors do not use - both of which increase your chance of winning business from customers you may not have previously reached.
4. Provides valuable data
By selling on multiple sales channels, your audience increases and diversifies; therefore, it can provide you with more insightful data on your customers buying behaviours, demographics and interests, to further inform your sales strategies and decisions.
3 Potential pitfalls of multi-channel selling
1. Time constraints
Keeping on top of your listings on all platforms can be time consuming. You may need to monitor the listings data and make tweaks to your item titles and descriptions to suit different customer bases on each platform or create listings for new products across them all. This admin could take focus away from the other day-to-day activities of running a business.
2. Keeping track of all sales
Having your products listed on multiple platforms means you’ll hopefully see an increase in sales. However, this can throw up its own challenges of picking, packaging and shipping all of the orders correctly and in a timely manner, to meet the customer’s expectations.
3. Inventory levels
Keeping on top of inventory can quickly become unmanageable when you’re processing higher order volumes though multi-channel selling. You could be so focused on getting orders shipped quickly and correctly, that you forget to stock check and begin running low on products. It’s crucial to know what items need replenishing and early enough for you to not be ‘out of stock’.
Multi-channel Listing Tools
Using software, retailers can take advantage of the benefits of multi-channel listing with the right processes in place, ensuring organised business operations and a great customer experience. Multi-channel listing software can offer a solution to all of the potential pitfalls of selling on multiple marketplaces.
5 benefits of using multi-channel listing software:
- Reduce time spent listing products on multiple channels
- 1 single login and platform to list products on all of your sales platforms
- Manage orders coming in from multiple channels
- Automate tasks such as printing shipping labels or selecting couriers at the best price
- Keep track of inventory and when you need to restock
Being able to list, sell and fulfill orders from a single system, such as an order management solution, ultimately saves time, money and reduces potential errors; giving your customers what they want – a fast and reliable experience from purchase to delivery.
Why use multi-channel listing software?
Mintsoft offers all of the above capability for ecommerce retailers, whether they sell on 1 or multiple channels.
We recently conducted a survey with customers using the Multi-channel Listings feature and some of the things they said about the tool are:
- “Simple & easy to use”
- “User-friendly”
- “Saves time”
- “Wouldn’t hesitate to recommend”
One customer continued by saying that their time spent managing listings was reduced from 1 day to 20 minutes!
