Incorporating more selling channels into your ecommerce strategy is an easy way to grow your customer base and revenue streams. Today there are more ways to reach customers – both in terms of number and variety of channels – than we could have imagined not so long ago. And as the number of channels continues to rise the need to embrace multichannel selling will become not only a good idea, but a critical one. In order to help grow your business we want to ensure that users like you are working as efficiently as possible. So we’ve compiled everything you need to know about being an effective multichannel seller. In this article we will cover:

• What is Multichannel Selling?
• Why You Should Become a Multichannel Seller
• Conversion Tips to increase your sales and increase brand trust

What is Multichannel Ecommerce Selling?

Multichannel marketing is the strategy of selling your products across multiple channels—whether they be your website, online marketplaces, social media, or physical retailers. Listing products on multiple platforms allows you to meet customers where they are and reach a wider customer base. 

One of the easiest ways to find more customers is to reach them where they shop on different platforms or avenues. With the help of WebForce + ShipStation you can increase your product sales and create long-term customers and drive them back to your website. 

Multichannel selling is a super effective Strategy that Boosts Sales and Increases Brand Recognition. When you add an additional selling channel like amazon, clickbank or maxweb or even your own website and funnels to your CRM and sync within ShipStation you will also increase your brand recognition and customer base as well as many more benefits.

Best Practices from WebForce

Here are a few tips and tricks for becoming a successful multichannel seller. Our ecommerce cloud platform helps streamline your selling channels, client relationship management, subscriptions and payments as well as learning management in a single solution. We provide all the tools you need to run an online business and integrate seamlessly with ShipStation to help you grow your online efforts.

Marketplaces vs. Branded Ecommerce Platforms:

In addition to having both a physical and ecommerce store, there are several types of online marketplaces and platforms where you can sell your products to people who otherwise might not find you. 

But not every channel is a good fit for every business. For example, to provide a streamlined customer experience, many of these marketplaces will prioritize the marketplace as the brand name instead of letting you showcase yours. That can be difficult if your strategy relies on having a recognizable brand. And many online sales channels charge fees for product listings and or sales commissions. 

And while there are a variety of options for merchants to choose from, not every marketplace or channel is right for everyone. Here’s a breakdown of how you can narrow your focus on the right channels for you and your retail business:

Marketplaces: 

Marketplaces are a third-party site that includes product listings from many sellers across product categories. Examples include Amazon, eBay, Walmart, and Etsy.

What are the benefits of selling on a marketplace? 

It’s convenient to get started and maintain: An online marketplace is a great option for sellers, especially new ones. Because these sites are established it can save a retailer a lot of time and allow them to avoid building a website from scratch.

Wide audience: Sites like Amazon and eBay are trusted and well established. Consumers are comfortable making purchases and are accustomed to going there instead of somewhere new to find products. As many marketplaces are already household names, they have millions of shoppers who are searching for products like yours. It doesn’t require much effort to get your products in front of potential customers.

Which marketplace is right for you?

Amazon 

Huge existing audience: Amazon has 150 million Prime members, alone. 

Brand recognition and trustworthiness: Amazon is one of the most highly recognized brands in the world. It is the first stop for many consumers on their buying journey. It has a valuable reputation due to fast shipping and free and easy returns. 

eBay 

eBay offers the option for merchants to sell their products via auction-style selling.

Select a starting price and eBay users can then bid on the product until the auction is over. Once it’s over, you can sell to the person with the highest bid price. 

Walmart 

Scale and customer reach: The Walmart Marketplace has over 110 million visitors each month. 

Walmart is focused on value: To sell on the Walmart Marketplace, your business must apply and be approved. Their market is focused first and foremost on low prices. 

For more information, check out How Selling on the Walmart Marketplace Helps Ecommerce Merchants.

Etsy 

Niche market for artisan goods and handmade items. 

Built-in customer base: Etsy has a strong, existing customer base so you can spend less time and money bringing your audience to the platform. 

For more information, check out the Five Advantages of Selling on Etsy.

Branded Ecommerce Platforms:

Branded ecommerce platforms, often referred to as shopping carts, are an independent ecommerce website that a seller runs, where buyers purchase goods directly from the website belonging to the business. Many are built using platforms likes Shopify, BigCommerce, and WooCommerce.

What are the benefits of a Branded Ecommerce Platform?

Maintain Strong Brand Consistency: When you build your own website with a brand ecommerce website, you have total control over what it looks like, what it says, and how it works. This provides a great opportunity to showcase your unique brand. Some platforms even offer flexibility over design, pre-built templates, and integrations with other systems.

Maintain Your Customer Base: Having your own store allows you to get direct access to your customers. You can target people who visit your site with ads, market to those who have already purchased from you, and stay connected with them. 

Which branded ecommerce platform is right for you?

WebForce Ecommerce Store

Our Robust ecommerce selling feature is similar to the widely known Shopify storefront. Our trusted ecommerce selling platform you can set up your own store to sell from directly. Our E-commerce CRM platform allows you to sell on your website through sales funnels, storefront, outbound phone sales and on multiple selling platforms. WebForce All-In-One Ecommerce CRM has integrations with other marketplaces Clickbank makes online selling simple. 

Not Just Ecommerce, Our platform provides an array of tools and features to increase sales and conversions. Everything designed to remove the burden of tech, increase sales and make it more convenient for customers. 

Learn More About WebForce All-In-One Ecommerce CRM

BigCommerce

Multichannel integrations: BigCommerce has a wide range of integrations with various selling channels, including some marketplaces and social media channels like Instagram and Facebook. These integrations make the multichannel selling process easier to manage. 

WooCommerce 

WooCommerce for WordPress: WooCommerce is a plugin that gives you the ability to build a basic online store on the WordPress platform. Using WooCommerce is ideal for starting out and testing ideas. Although not a scalable platform to build a 6 figures + and up business, it does require extensive plugins and maintenance. 

Understand your target market before expanding into other selling channels. Once you do, you can better evaluate which selling channel will fit your target customers and their buying habits. Selecting the right selling channels will be integral to the success of your multichannel strategy. 

Conversion Tips to Increase Your Sales and Build Brand Trust

In direct response marketing & conversion rate optimization, you're always taught to keep users and customers in a streamlined sales funnel to minimize drop off and distractions from page to page. You want to ensure a frictionless process for your customers. However, when you leverage multi channel ecommerce selling you can use this to your advantage to increase your brand trust on key pages. 

Landing Page Conversion Tip

When running any kind of traffic and advertising traffic to your landing page,( cold ,warm, native, email & affiliate traffic alike), you want to leverage social proof and testimonials from multiple online selling channels. Marketplaces like Amazon, Facebook and even your website all offer trust building options like testimonials and reviews. Some of the best offers, products and services all highlight a multitude of these from different channels to help build trust for your visitors.

Cart Page Trust & Sales Pricing Tip

Your Cart page pricing & checkout options are crucial to your success. Amazon’s biggest value add is the amount of users it has on its ecosystem. You can increase sales on amazon and your website alike by having the checkout with amazon option on your website cart page. At first glance, this seems like a “basic tip” but let’s get a little deeper. 

Offering more payment options is not always better. It’s very easy to over do it and too many payment options leads to analysis paralysis for your potential customers. However, if done right you can leverage these marketplaces to increase your sales and gain some added SEO boost. 

One of our clients leveraged the amazon marketplace to offer a “Pay with Amazon” Button on the cart page. The link from the cart page was a 2 step url for amazon, that help register keyword searches and visits to their listing in amazon of the same product. Helping with organic search results within amazon on their desired keyword. The increase in targeted traffic helped lower their cost per click on ads within Amazon too. 

Now here’s the kick, the price of the product in amazon was slightly higher. $10-$15 USD more. This is not only so that you can overcome the commission due to amazon but also to help you get the customer back to your website and buy there. The simple fact that your product exists in amazon, gives the customer instant trust. (Extra points if you have great customer reviews and 5 star rating on amazon as well). But now your visitor is incentivized to save by buying through your website for a better price. Win-Win. 

For those that buy on amazon, great they get the product delivered to them quickly if they have prime AND they also know that they can get it directly from your website for less. 

There's a whole host of other tips with Multichannel sales that can be achieved but you can start by implementing these here and see how your sales start to increase!

If you’d like to speak to our Marketing/Ecommerce Experts, please book a FREE Consultation with us Today!