Over the past decade, e-commerce has experienced unprecedented growth, and this trend is expected to continue, given the global ecommerce market size is anticipated to reach $8.1 trillion by 2026. Monitoring these development trends can give organizations helpful background information and aid in curating an effective ecommerce marketplace strategy for their business.
Now, the eCommerce industry’s growth and the number of digital buyers worldwide have consistently climbed to more than 2.64 billion presenting businesses with a green signal toward new marketplace expansion.
Typically, businesses will go through different stages before progressing: starting locally, capturing a larger share of the local market, expanding to a national level, and eventually establishing an international presence.
Though, as simple as it sounds, it’s not amateur stuff to penetrate a new market. Because, even if you do expand your roots to a new market, the bigger question remains, “What’s next”? The foreign effects of entering a new market remain unknown.
Follow this article as the roadmap to your next marketplace expansion checklist, as you may call it, before developing your ecommerce marketplace strategy for expansion.
Marketplace Channels To Explore:
Here is a list of ecommerce marketplaces you can explore for new marketplace expansion. The list is arranged in the order of marketplaces with the largest share and down.
1. Amazon
With the most significant chunk of the eCommerce marketplace in the USA, Amazon rightfully enjoys its title as the USA’s ecommerce giant. Electronics, clothing, home decor, and food are just a few categories covered by the company’s catalog. Cloud computing, digital advertising, and Amazon’s streaming services are also areas where the company excels.
2. Walmart
Walmart is the largest grocery and food retailer in the United States and a well-established omnichannel retailer. The traditional business expanded into the digital realm in the early 2000s. Since then, internet shopping has developed to the point where Walmart is now one of the top five online retailers in the world in terms of revenue.
3. eBay
eBay is a virtual marketplace where people worldwide can buy and sell all sorts of products and services. The marketplace follows the Apple store, a premium store selling Apple’s electronic ecosystem, with a 3% market share among the USA’s top five ecommerce marketplace.
4. MercadoLibre
MercadoLibre (MELI), with its roots in Argentina, is sometimes compared to Amazon.com in Latin America. However, it is also a fintech powerhouse in the region. MELI stock has risen this year thanks to the expansion of both companies.
MercadoLibre’s Nasdaq-listed shares have gained more than 75% in 2023, most recently buoyed by a third-quarter report that surpassed analyst estimates.
Analyze Your Current Market Position and Sales Funnel
Before getting into any complex online marketplace strategy for expansion, take a step back and assess your current market position and sales funnel before exploring. If you take the time to analyze your SWOT, you’ll be better equipped to decide which marketplaces to enter and how to tweak your listings for maximum sales.
The five stages of the sales funnel help you analyze the steps hindering your sales potential.
Once you’re clear on your target demographic, you can perform your SWOT analysis to better leverage opportunities such as marketplace expansion to grow your business.
Before you enter Amazon or any other marketplace, evaluate the standing and demand of your product and its potential to compete with a swarm of sellers selling similar products.
Identify New Market Opportunities
Our second ecommerce marketplace strategy also includes thorough research. Analyze industry trends, design new items that might be a better match inside the new marketplace, or even organize focus groups and beta testing to measure your new audience’s impression. Information collecting puts you in a position to make choices that benefit your business’s success and bottom line.
How to be sure about your product’s success in the new marketplace?
- Whether or not to enter a new market might be informed by a combination of seasonality and overall performance measures.
- Based on your target market and how well you are appealing to them, demographics might point the way for your brand.
- By comparing two versions of your page, you can see which one converts your visitors into customers more effectively.
This online marketplace strategy is mostly skipped by many businesses getting into multi-channel ecommerce, as it requires some grunt work. However, businesses can collaborate with the professionals at Prime Retail Solutions, offering 3P Marketplace Services, which handles everything from research to developing an effective ecommerce marketplace strategy.
Establish A Strong Brand Perception In The Marketplace
Your name and standing matter when developing an ecommerce marketplace strategy. It’s not enough to provide a novel product to the market; your business and its products must also resonate with the channels, such as consumers looking for electronics, clothing, shoes and jewelry, books, home/kitchen appliances, or beauty products will mostly go to Amazon.com, while grocery, toys, healthcare products consumers will visit Walmart.com instead.
The long-term success of your business in a given market depends critically on how consumers perceive and engage with your brand. To succeed, you need an effective online marketplace strategy to ensure your customers have a consistent and positive experience throughout your sales channels. Brand control regulates a company’s brand to boost ecommerce sales without compromising its reputation.
Optimise Operations and Reduce Costs
Although it may seem like an obvious ecommerce marketplace strategy that a company should prioritize the most critical components of its operations in a given market, many still need to do so. If you want to sell to a new market, you must know how your systems will handle the added stress. It is up to you to anticipate and adapt to the varying demands on your fulfillment and inventory caused by marketplace expansion.
Enter The New Marketplace Like A Pro!
- Through market research, find out how much of an interest there is in your product’s new distribution channels.
- Ensure your supply chain is ready to sell in emerging markets by conducting a thorough evaluation.
- Reduce the workload on your internal systems and speed up shipping by using a third-party fulfillment service. Or utilize the fulfillment service of the ecommerce marketplace you’re entering, such as Walmart Fulfillment Services or Fulfillment By Amazon.
Or better yet, partner with Prime Retail Solution, committed to taking care of everything for you. Our experts and their efficient ecommerce marketplace strategy, specific to your business, will handle everything from keeping track of inventory demands across channels, dealing with pricing concerns, and coordinating shipment and fulfillment, especially when policies vary depending on the sales channel, ensuring your business gets a boost ecommerce sales.
Digitize Your Operations For Maximum Efficiency
Since it is impossible to eliminate human error, it is possible to minimize it as much to improve efficiency in our processes. Employing an ecommerce marketplace strategy that revolves around Artificial Intelligence or automation can be most helpful in inventory tracking, order status updates, security checks, regulatory compliance, and even answering customer service requests, which can all be streamlined with the help of automation.
Juniper Research reports a growth of 230% in machine learning spending between 2019 and 2023. Such impressive growth indicates that more and more businesses are employing AI in their online marketplace strategy as they realize the significance of automated operations, and how it has helped them boost ecommerce sales.
If you’re convinced by the numbers and arguments so far, here is how you can leverage AI to optimize your ecommerce store’s performance:
- Create chatbots to answer frequently asked inquiries and divide up customer service.
- Reduce wasted time by applying machine learning for stock-keeping-unit (SKU) input, transaction processing, or order fulfillment.
- Improve your business’s relationship with your clientele by using AR (Artificial Reality) to let potential customers try out the product before they buy it.
Partner With Prime Retail Solution And Forget About The Rest!
At this point, you may have found the ecommerce marketplace strategy that can help you survive and thrive in changing market conditions. Prime Retail Solutions helps you execute any of the strategies we discussed. Our channel and merchandising specialists help you reach a wider audience than ever before for new marketplace expansion. Find out how our experts helped TRISWIM boost ecommerce sales and decrease their ACoS by 13.83%. However, if you are interested in selling on Walmart or are already selling on Walmart, read our Comprehensive Guide to Selling On The Walmart Marketplace and enjoy skyrocketing sales for your ecommerce business. If you’re a marketer or a business owner interested in multi-channel ecommerce, you should check out our Multi-Channel Ecommerce Marketing Tips for valuable tips to develop an incredibly effective online marketplace strategy.
Share
