Marketplace management software: How to choose the right one!
Adopting a multichannel strategy, enables ecommerce businesses to grow their market footprint beyond their own online stores. Marketplaces have a crucial role in this strategy, enabling retailers to tap into a huge cohort of engaged buyers.
However, as the number of sales channels grows, so can the complexity of managing ecommerce operations.
Multichannel ecommerce requires new capabilities - to avoid becoming bogged-down by the everyday business of managing a growing array of sales channels. This is where marketplace management software comes in.
What is marketplace management software?
Marketplace management software empowers sellers to manage their product data, orders, and logistics with minimal friction across all sales channels. Instead of using a different app for each platform or service, everything is managed from a single interface.
This kind of software means that brands increase the efficiency of multichannel selling significantly. This unlocks their ability to scale more rapidly, without the constraints of manual methods.
Why use marketplace management software?
By leveraging marketplace management software, brands can effortlessly manage listings on multiple sales channels, as well as multichannel pricing strategies, promotions, and campaigns.
Marketplace management software integrates directly with brands’ internal systems like ERP, WMS and PIM software.
As well as simplifying listings management, an integrated ecommerce setup enables you to automatically keep accurate stock levels on all your sales channels, helping you to avoid overselling or stockouts.
What does marketplace management software do?
Marketplace management software should offer a wide array of capabilities and advanced tooling that make marketplace management a breeze for ecommerce professionals.
Let’s take a deeper look at how it achieves all this..
How marketplace management software solves the challenges of multichannel ecommerce:
Product content and syndication
Online retailers must optimize their product detail pages, as it helps provide consumers with the assurance they need to complete their purchase.
Perhaps even more critical, each marketplace has unique requirements and specifications for product content. Without meeting these requirements for each channel, product listings may be rejected, and products can underperform.
Ultimately, the result of poor content is disappointing sales results and excessive returns rates.
Marketplace management software solves this issue by enabling listing management from multiple marketplaces on a single platform, ensuring your listings meet marketplace requirements.
If your product content fails to meet requirements, you get a notification about the error (and which fields are incomplete) – so you can take targeted action.
By editing these in bulk, sellers can save huge amounts of time; ChannelEngine’s AI-powered automations enable some product content and unique ‘virtual product bundles’ to be created automatically.
Pricing and Promotions
Pricing has a direct effect on your sales and profit margins, so ecommerce managers must be able to manage their prices and promotions with maximum efficiency and intelligence.
ChannelEngine’s marketplace management software offers online retailers numerous capabilities for optimizing their pricing and profits.
For marketplace sellers, one of the most important element of pricing, is your ability to have your SKUs featured in the Buy Box.
Winning your share of this prized position in marketplaces like Amazon and Bol is essential for achieving greater sales. A significant factor in winning the Buy Box is having the best price, but this cannot be achieved by manually adjusting prices.
ChannelEngine’s Repricer dynamically adjusts your pricing (in line with price rules) to match your competitor’s prices – so you stay competitive for as long as the competition still has stock.
There are additional capabilities too, such as creating rules for rational prices in every currency, handling currency conversions, and determining payout currencies.
You can also set price rules, to ensure that you sell at your desired margins.
Order management
Order management is a crucial part of successful ecommerce, but also a task that takes a lot of time unless you have the right tooling.
With a sufficiently powerful marketplace management platform, you can use automation to take care of most repetitive tasks, and create simplified processes and flows that boost efficiency and reduce handling times.
The ChannelEngine platform includes a variety of tools and options that greatly reduce time spent on this essential task. For example, you can create simple rules in natural language that streamline order handling processes, and use automations that send personalized updates to customers.
With minimal effort, you can keep customers informed with automated shipping statuses, tracking data, and follow-up emails.
ChannelEngine’s order management tooling also works with a variety of third-party fulfillment solutions, so all sales can be managed the same way regardless of fulfillment location.
Popular marketplace fulfillment solutions we already support include:
- Fulfillment by Amazon (FBA)
- Logistiek via Bo.coml (LVB)
- Fulfilled by CDiscount (FBC)
- Zalando Fulfillment Solutions (ZFS)
- Amazon Multichannel Fulfillment (MCF)
- …and many more!
You can also automate order management for different fulfillment solutions, based on available stock.
With every aspect of order management (orders, shipment, returns) on a single dashboard, ecommerce management has never been easier.
Reporting and analytics
Without intelligence over performance, your best efforts will fail to yield results. This is why reporting and analytics hold an important role in ecommerce.
However, selling on multiple marketplaces can make it hard to correlate data points into a cohesive ‘big picture.’ You also need detailed analytics that help boost performance on each channel.
ChannelEngine solves this problem for ecommerce managers by offering granular channel specific metrics. These enable sellers to optimize sales on each channel, and across their entire ecommerce operations.
Macro-scale KPIs give a clear picture of sales performance, with breakdowns for revenue, margins, expenses, and returns rates.
Going deeper, you can obtain additional insights that gather insights across all channels and offer detailed information about customer experiences such as return reasons.
Inventory management
Before using marketplace management software, ecommerce managers would need to manually allocate stock for each channel and update these constantly to ensure total coverage.
This used to take a lot of time.
The modern solution is automated stock synchronization, using your own backend as a single source of truth for stock availability.
ChannelEngine, for example, enables online retailers to easily synchronize stock levels for multichannel sales.
It also works in perfect concert with multi-warehouse strategies, 1P and 3PL solutions. As a result, your entire stock is available on every single channel - so you don’t miss a single sale.
Whenever a sale is made, the stock level is adjusted accordingly and the order is sent to the correct fulfillment location, based on your own selling rules.
You can find out more about ChannelEngine’s marketplace management capabilities here.
Ready to see what the ChannelEngine platform can do for your multichannel ecommerce business? Book your free demo today.
