6 Tips for Selling on Marketplaces (E143)

Notes: Marketplace ExamplesAmazon https://sellercentral.amazon.com/eBay https://ebay.comWalmart https://supplier.walmart.com/Category SpecificGunBroker - https://www.gunbroker.com/Weapon Depot - https://www.weapondepot.com/ Marketplaces can be jet fuel, a fast way to scale or burn your business if you're not ready. Optimize the Product ListingToday quality wins over quantityNo more 'spray and pray'Spend time researching competitive pricingFactor in all the costsMonitor where you rank in the listingAmazon - Search results then Buy BoxeBay - Search resultsOver-invest in Customer ServiceSeller reviews are prominently displayedOn Amazon, slow customer service response times are used against youNail FulfillmentUse a 3PLNever ship late (closely monitored on Amazon)Follow the rules of the marketplace Sponsors: Drip – Get a free demo of Drip using this coupon code!Spark Shipping – Dropshipping Automation Software Transcript: Charles (00:00): In this episode of The Businesso eCommerce I talk about tips for selling on marketplaces. This is the Business eCommerce Episode 145. Charles (00:18): Welcome to the Business of eCommerce. The show that helps eCommerce retailers start launch and grow the eCommerce business. I'm your host, Charles Palleschi. And I'm here today to talk about some of my tips for selling on marketplaces. So to start off marketplaces, I kind of think of them as jet fuel for any commerce seller, right? A lot of folks are selling on their own Shopify site, their own big commerce, their own Magento site somewhere. And at some point they decide to move their operations over to a marketplace to kind of add that as a way to enhance our augment, the current offering. And this can be done in many different ways. And I see a lot of sellers do this and the ones that do it right, can drastically increase the sales and the ones that kind of aren't ready for it have issues right out of the gate and can really cause actual problems for their business. Charles (01:11): So I want to outline a few tips on some do's and don'ts and just things that I've kind of found over time. So, first few marketplace examples. When we're saying marketplaces, we're talking some of the big ones, obviously Amazon, eBay, Walmart, that sort of thing. Also there's some specific marketplaces you'll find for different niches. So clothing has theirs, for instance, firearms, aren't allowed to be sold on some of the larger marketplaces, but there's folks like gun broker weapons, Depot, they have marketplaces just went bash. So even if you're selling a product that maybe can't be sold on Amazon, there usually are other places where it can be sold or just places, for instance, like clothing there's places where community sold better, right. Where folks are actually looking for that sort of product. So I'd always say first, do your research on what marketplaces are available. Charles (02:06): And don't just jump right to Amazon eBay, the big ones, because there are some specific ones that might actually get, you might be smaller, but might get better sales. So we'll sit out six steps here to kind of reveal things that I've just kind of found from talking to different sellers, different retailers that would be better off knowing from the beginning. So tip number one is be sure to optimize your product listings. The sound may sound obvious, but at the same time, what, I just hear a lot of new sellers saying first time they get on the platform, they always have these aspirations that they want to have 10,000 listing, a hundred thousand, these big 500,000, these big numbers, right? And this actually used to work this back in the day was actually a strategy that did work, right? You just went on Amazon. You just listed as much as you could. Charles (02:58): You did the spray and pray. And it worked actually just because there weren't that many of our listings and you go on eBay,