Managing the Workload of Multiple Marketplaces

ONE HUB TO RULE IT ALL

There’s no denying the truth any longer – marketplaces are popular. Amazon alone amasses 407 million visits to their UK site every month. Marketplaces are growing, and they’re ripe with opportunity.

Ambitious businesses are branching out from traditional ecommerce into marketplaces, aiming to sell more and expand their brand. But despite their surface similarities, under the bonnet of marketplaces lies a vastly more complicated tangle of product information standards, requirements, and extra admin. You’ll need a way to leap these hurdles.

How do you access a new customer base, scale and grow quickly, and keep inventory turning over? How do you do all of that while still delivering accurate, consistent, and contextual content to your customers?

In a nutshell – put all of your data in one place. Consumers want to buy everything from one source – it only makes sense you do the same for your data. So that’s precisely what Comestri’s Channel Manager does.

Because a complicated problem doesn’t need to have a complicated solution. That’s the power of Product Information Management (PIM) – one clean system that unites all of your ecommerce data.

Hurdle 1: Managing the Marketplace Workload

It’s all about getting noticed. But getting noticed takes a lot of work – customers want products that meet a dizzying range of criteria; colour, size, use, weight, material, dimensions, even the number of zips.

When you’re selling on a marketplace, you’re in competition with every other vendor selling something similar. Complete, high-quality product data is the best way to differentiate yourself. Collecting, updating and managing this information for your own website from separate systems (or dare we say it, spreadsheets) is a sickeningly complex task. But not only that, your product data must be consistent across every channel customers can find your products.

Customers build faith in your brand from seeing consistent product information across multiple channels. Amalgamating and checking this data manually will only lead to mistakes and loss of customer trust.

By using a PIM, you can ensure all of your product information is consistent across a wide range of channels. It acts as a single source of truth for all of your data, taking away the nagging doubt that there might be a mistake in your product information on one of the channels you operate through.

Hurdle 2: Meeting Product Information Standards and Requirements

Context is king. Each marketplace is picky in its own peculiar way when it comes to product detail pages. What’s ok on Amazon, likely won’t be the same for eBay.

Policies and regulations change for everything from your content, product descriptions, the code you use, to even how you go about updating your products. Selling through Amazon, for example, requires you to adjust your product information for categories like books, music, videos. Where you might be allowed product description of 200 characters (including spaces) on Amazon. On other channels it may be fewer or more.

A centralised PIM makes that process far less of a headache. It manages all of your different types of data – technical, emotional, and usage – then enriches and enhances it. Having done so, it then effortlessly exports your precisely tailored data to where you need it to go. It means your customers get a regionally specific experience with consistently high-quality data across every interaction with your brand and products.

The intention was to find a piece of technology to help us streamline our marketplace strategy, we started looking at Comestri as a platform to help us handle and manage multiple marketplaces and make our lives easier.

Paula Mitchell, Chief Digital Officer

When General Pants Co. made the strategic decision to expand their offering into marketplaces, they knew they needed a marketplace solution that worked with their existing ERP. They needed a technology partner who could simplify their processes and enable their strategy in an efficient manner. And Comestri delivered.

Order, Inventory, Fulfilment, and Returns Taken Care Of

More channels equals more orders flying in from Shopify, Amazon, eBay, and your physical stores. All at once – lucky you! But despite choosing to shop online, customers still expect you to scratch their immediate gratification itch. They’re checking their emails every hour for confirmation their package is on the way. You cannot be slowed down by manual order processing and endless error corrections.

A distributed order management system handles it all. Sellers can manage every order coming in from all your sales channels and every order leaving through multiple fulfilment points. All the information gets funnelled back into the OMS, letting retailers manage it all with one login interface.

It’s just easier this way. Instead of having to login to each channel or POS system, everything is managed from beginning in one familiar place.

The Simplest Solutions Fix the Most Complex of Problems

Marketplaces are growing because they’re convenient, cost-effective ways for customers to shop – despite the complexity you face when expanding onto them. Brands absolutely should be using these places to meet customers where they want to be, and sell more. It just so happens the best way to offer customers more ways to easily find your brand is a convenient, cost-effective solution for retailers, too – Comestri’s Channel Manager.

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