Many ecommerce business owners selling on online marketplaces are getting it all wrong.
You have expended great effort and expense to attract a large number of sellers and buyers to your online store.
But regardless, chances are that you are facing a high rate of seller attrition.
You can do some minor things that can greatly help your online store. Here are some common errors that can easily be avoided.
1. Products not Displayed Properly
The golden rule is to keep it simple and easy. Regardless of how many products you have listed, each specific product should be easy to find. Often when online sellers try to navigate to their own product, they find it impossible, unless they specifically search for their seller-id. This causes shopper frustration and dissatisfaction. No need to reveal your trade secrets, but communicate some of the factors used to rank similar or identical products.
2. Bad Images
In ecommerce marketplaces, poor quality pictures of products could easily result in the loss of sales. Avoid poor picture quality that makes your site look unprofessional and does not help the branding of your products.3. Inventory Problems Repel Customers
Sellers on your marketplace are not necessarily exclusive to you. This can lead to many common backend problems linked to the seller’s inability to reconcile sales and returns on multiple platforms. By following industry standards in terms of your open APIs and dashboards, sellers will be able to integrate you into their backend software.4. Ignoring Deadlines
Small sellers can take deadlines and time constraints for granted at times as selling on ecommerce marketplaces is just a side activity of this group. Ironically this situation is made worse as this category of sellers also generates a large volume of customer service requests. Identify high maintenance sellers and make them get back on track immediately.5. Pricing Is Not Trivial
Having the lowest price is not necessarily the best way to make the most sales. This may have been partly true while back, but today it is possible for the tech-enabled seller to price smartly. A good tactic to let your sellers know is to be aware of the prices at which others are selling the same or similar products, and price it slightly lower. Sellers don’t need to be the lowest-priced. It is not the ones that are selling at a loss that are making all the sales.
These are good starting points. You can expand this list by talking to some of the sellers who have stopped affiliating themselves with your online store to evaluate if you see a pattern. Often, they will help enlighten you on which error you are committing.
