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Pros and Cons of Selling Online on third Party E-Commerce Platforms: 10 Tips for Beginner Sellers
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What are the main Advantages and Disadvantages that every Online Sellers Should Know About Selling Through an E commerce Marketplace.
When it comes to selling your products online, we have wide choices available with us today. But making a choice is not as simple here as it sounds. Proper research needs to be done before opting for any online marketplace to sell your products.
If you are not clear about whether the marketplace is meant for the kind of product you deal in or not, then to your rescue here we list down some of the pros and cons which will guide you through. Here they go!
Today, Online Marketplaces are flourishing everywhere in the world. They have spreaded all across the places and people of every walk prefer to buy online when it comes to ease and comfort. So, online stores and big ecommerce platforms are used by millions of sellers across the world to sell products. In contrary to that there are several thousands of sellers who are operating their own online stores to sell products.
As a seller you have two ways to reap the benefits of selling online:
- Sell products on third party ecommerce stores.
- Open your own online store and start selling products.
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Tips for sellers for Selling Via Online Marketplace: Ups and Downs of it
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Pros of Selling Through an Online Marketplace
1- You Get to Explore & Test New Markets as a Seller
If you want to access global online markets and want to see where your product gets the best response & customers then these online marketplaces can help on this front. You can expand across the regions where your products sell best.
You have the much needed freedom to sell different products on different ecommerce marketplaces as per the popularity of the sites.
For an example, if you want to sell books then you have these online stores which sell the highest numbers of books globally.
As a seller you can take risk of selling your products on various ecommerce platforms because if there is not enough sale coming from an ecommerce then you can try another one. This can’t be the easy case if you run your own online store.
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2- Larger Audience
As there are various online marketplaces existing, many of these have huge user base. Millions of users visit these marketplaces. The advantage here is you get to showcase your products to these many users & get huge number of customers.
Big online giants like Amazon, eBay, Flipkart, etc are very big online marketplaces. They get really high number of daily visitors who visit them from the following means:
- Direct visits
- Search engine visits
- Referral visits ( millions of sites refer them for many reasons)
- Affiliate Sites referral visits
- Advertising based visits
3- Find New Opportunities
Using small marketplaces will also provide you the opportunity to network and seek advice. You get to access new community & find new opportunities lying therein. Be it a big online marketplace or small, the advantage lies in both.
Every now and then new ecommerce platforms are making it to the big names. You as a seller always stand a good chance to find new platforms and marketplaces.
You are free to switch between any online marketplaces. You are not bound to stay on a single marketplace. You are always open for new opportunities.
4- Online Store Optimization
Big marketplaces spent huge amount on optimizing their site across the board so that users can access it via mobile or tablet as well. You might not have done that for your own site though.
Here the advantage is, you don’t have to spend money for Search engine or mobile optimization for your storefront, the marketplace already did that for you.
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5- Visibility & Exposure
- Affiliates, Bloggers as well as the press media like to find, know and write about new & interesting products.
- When you sell in niche marketplaces, you grab attention of such online media to your advantage.
- There is a full brigade of online affiliate marketers who promote ecommerce products to earn commissions in return.
- If your products appear attractive to such affiliates then they promote and market your products for free.
Cons of Selling Online through an eCommerce Marketplace
1- Severe Competition from Similar Brands or Products
As a retailer on these sites you face competition from the those selling products similar to you or in your category. Big might not let you survive on this space but you can still manage to keep your game up via stuff like more personal customer service.
2- Tendency to Forget the Brand
When people buy from online sites like Etsy, eBay, Amazon and various others, they tend to remember the site from where they bought the product and forget the brand. If you look deeply, it’s your loss.
You would not be able to position your brand in the mind of the customers.
3- Hard To Manage Too Many Orders
Listing your product on these sites connect you to wider audience – & huge number of customers. When you receive orders more than what you can handle, in that case failing on fulfilling even a single order can do damage to your image.
4- Less Control over Detailed Product Description
Yes, many of these sites require you to fill in detailed description of the products which gets unnecessarily time consuming for retailers especially the ones who are not the big retailers.
Moreover, you don’t have control over the way you want to display a listing. Everything is predefined. So, no space for imagination in this case.
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5- Time Consuming Sites Can Be Tedious
The site may require you to answer a lot of questions before a sale is made or it could in any other way be time consuming one. Therefore, the platform must be chosen wisely after complete understanding of all the sites. Make sure you are able to manage it on daily basis with ease & comfort.
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