Find out how to sell effectively on over 60 platforms without affecting service quality. This article offers practical strategies for successful multi-channel expansion, keeping customer satisfaction at the heart of your business.
In a world where e-commerce is constantly evolving, expanding your presence on multiple sales platforms has become an essential strategy for companies wishing to maximize their reach and sales. But how can you expand your business across more than 60 platforms without compromising the quality of service for which your brand is renowned? This article explores the undeniable benefits of sales channel diversification and guides you through proven strategies for maintaining an impeccable customer experience, wherever they choose to buy your products.
Why diversify your sales channels?
Diversifying your sales channels is more than just a strategy for increasing your company’s visibility. It’s a fundamental step towards strengthening and expanding your business in an ever-changing e-commerce market. Let’s discover the key benefits of this approach.
Reach new customers and address a larger market
The figures speak for themselves: 40% of online sales in France are made on marketplaces. This means that an e-commerce strategy exclusive to your own website could limit you to just 60% of the potential market. Ignoring marketplaces means missing out on a considerable share of your potential revenue.
But what does this mean for you? Quite simply, the opportunity to model your business model to capture not only a wider audience, but also to integrate a diversity of purchasing behaviors. Indeed, 63% of consumers perceive shopping on marketplaces not only as convenient, but also as secure, thanks to the variety of products available, attractive loyalty programs, and the proven reliability of these platforms.
Yet only 36% of e-tailers seize this opportunity, which raises a crucial question: are you part of this percentage, or is it time to explore this still under-exploited territory? Adopting an omnichannel approach by integrating marketplaces into your sales strategy not only enables you to increase your visibility, but also to test new markets with disconcerting ease.
Marketplaces offer a platform for effectively reaching up to 42 million buyers in France, representing tangible growth levers for developing your sales. What’s more, they enable you to diversify your offering without the traditional constraints associated with range expansion. Whether you’re testing a new product or exploring an international market, marketplaces simplify the process by eliminating the need for costly and time-consuming market research.
The flexibility offered by these platforms is unprecedented. Once you’ve paid the subscription fee, you can adjust your offer in line with sales results, without the additional cost of expanding your catalog. This ability to modulate and experiment with your commercial offering represents a significant competitive advantage.
Finally, selling on marketplaces isn’t just about sales. It’s also a strategy for controlling and enhancing your brand image. Associating yourself with the trust that consumers place in these platforms can strengthen your reputation and broaden your audience. What’s more, by controlling the presentation of your products and collaborating with trusted partners, you ensure consistency and quality in your brand communication.
A business model that can be modelled
Adopting a flexible, scalable business model is crucial for companies seeking to extend their reach across diverse sales platforms. The foundation of this strategy rests on a simple yet powerful concept: the distribution of a varied catalog on as many marketplaces as possible. The objective? To create an easily understandable business model, based on a limited number of key KPIs, enabling reliable medium- to long-term planning devoid of unnecessary uncertainties.
The first success factor is production, which determines how many unique SKUs(Stock Keeping Units) your company can create and stock. The second, distribution, illustrates the ability to distribute these products on various marketplaces, each selected for its suitability for the product. For example, a modeling clay kit may be relevant on eBay, Amazon, or Cdiscount, but not necessarily on more specialized sites outside this framework. This target selection process ensures that each product finds its place on around 20 suitable marketplaces, maximizing its visibility. Finally, performance, the third factor, evaluates the revenue generated per product on each marketplace.
This model simplifies the economics behind an e-commerce operation compared to managing a single website, where numerous parameters such as conversion rate, cost per acquisition (CPA), and attribution issues complicate the strategy. With this model, you effectively outsource a significant part of your marketing to marketplaces. In doing so, you free yourself from the complexity of generating the first customer contact, allowing you to concentrate on strategic aspects such as pricing, technology, organization, management and product sourcing.
The use of specialized tools, which play a central role in this strategy, automates and simplifies catalog distribution and price management across multiple platforms. A cornerstone of this model is the use of technology partners for catalog distribution and price management, including solutions for automatically adjusting prices to take complex variables into account.
In this way, the omnichannel approach not only dilutes risk by diversifying revenue sources, it also constitutes a pragmatic management strategy, essential for navigating the sometimes tumultuous waters of e-commerce. The COVID-19 pandemic underlined the importance of this flexibility, demonstrating that companies with an omnichannel strategy can better absorb shocks, proving resilient in the face of unforeseen events.
Diversifying strategic risk
When it comes to entrepreneurship, diversification is not just a strategy, it’s a matter of survival. Faced with the risks inherent in running a business (credit, fund-raising, management), the idea of depending on a single player or channel seems not only risky, but almost foolhardy.
Let’s take an example: the OVH incident in Strasbourg in March 2021. A fire devastated one of the largest data centers, affecting numerous sites for almost two weeks. For some companies, this event meant the loss of 2% of their monthly sales. While this may seem minimal at first glance, it highlights a critical vulnerability in diversification strategy.
The risk doesn’t stop with hosting. Consider digital marketing: relying mainly on Google for SEO and SEA may seem tempting, given its predominance. But what happens if your site is suddenly penalized or your advertising suspended without warning? Over-reliance on a single channel can turn a minor setback into a major crisis.
The question of diversification also extends to sales channels. Relying on a single marketplace, whatever its size, is a risky gamble. Account suspension criteria can change, often without notice, jeopardizing your access to your customers. Recent crises, such as the COVID-19 pandemic, have demonstrated the importance of being able to adapt quickly to new markets and unexpected peaks in activity. By being prepared, some companies have managed not only to survive, but to thrive, spreading the impact over several months rather than suffering a sudden shock.
Finally, the battle for visibility against giants like Amazon or Cdiscount can seem daunting. The solution? Don’t play by their rules. The market is vast enough that competition between these giants creates opportunities for smaller, more agile players, who can exploit niches and differentiated strategies to capture and retain customers.
Diversifying your sales channels and marketing strategies is not simply a matter of increasing sales. It’s a prudent approach that minimizes strategic risks and ensures greater resilience in the face of the unexpected. Each channel, each platform becomes a piece in a larger puzzle, contributing to the stability and sustainable growth of your business.
How to avoid impacting service quality?
The only way to avoid impacting your quality of service while expanding across multiple sales platforms is to adopt an Order Management System(OMS). This tool not only enables you to efficiently manage your sales and inventory across a wide range of channels, but also ensures an impeccable customer experience, essential for success in the competitive e-commerce sector. But just how?
- Real-time order management: OMS instantly processes orders from over 120 sales channels. This feature avoids the processing delays and stock errors that can result from manual or decentralized order management.
- Real-time inventory synchronization: an efficient OMS ensures that your inventory is updated in real time across all channels. This avoids out-of-stock sales, minimizes order cancellations and improves customer loyalty by providing greater visibility and reliability of your inventory.
- Transparent communication on order progress: OMS enables you to communicate automatically with your customers at every stage of their order, from confirmation to delivery.
By integrating OMS into the heart of your sales strategy, you can not only manage your sales operations more efficiently and accurately, but also ensure that the quality of your customer service remains at a high level. Such a system enables you to stay focused on what really matters: developing your product and continuously improving your customers’ shopping experience.
Our customer’s assessment: YouDoIt
YouDoIt, our case study, perfectly illustrates the impact of a well-orchestrated multi-channel strategy. Currently active on 68 marketplaces, the company has seen its sales double in just two years. This remarkable growth has been underpinned by effective diversification of its sales channels and markets, with a presence in 28 countries, France remaining its main market. However, the company is making it a point of honor to broaden its horizons, notably towards Germany and the UK, markets with enormous potential but still under-exploited.
The importance of not being overly dependent on a single marketplace has been a key lesson for YouDoIt. By reducing the proportion of its sales generated by the largest marketplace to less than 20%, the company has diversified its risks and illustrated its ability to pivot and adapt to different markets. This flexibility is crucial in an uncertain economic climate, enabling YouDoIt to maintain stable growth despite the ups and downs of the market.
YouDoIt’s international success, with 40% of its sales generated abroad, bears witness to the importance of a global strategy. The ability to efficiently manage a volume of around 70,000 orders a year across different channels and markets is a remarkable logistical feat, made possible by impeccable synchronization and process automation via a high-performance Order Management System (OMS).
YouDoIt’s key performance indicators are equally impressive, with an almost instantaneous order acceptance time and a preparation time of just 24 hours. This performance is the result of a well-oiled logistics system and close collaboration with reliable transport partners. What’s more, maintaining an average rating of 4.6 out of 5 across all marketplaces is an eloquent indicator of customer satisfaction, an essential component of loyalty and sustainable development.
This testimonial from YouDoIt underlines the importance of an intelligent multi-channel strategy and impeccable logistics execution for e-tailers. The ability to expand into new markets while maintaining a high level of service is essential in a competitive business environment. The use of advanced technological tools, enabling fluid and integrated operations management, is proving to be a key success factor, allowing YouDoIt to focus on what really matters: growth and customer satisfaction.
Towards an effective multi-channel strategy
Adopting a multi-channel sales strategy is not just a trend, but a necessity for e-businesses looking to extend their reach and secure future growth. YouDoIt ‘s experience clearly illustrates how diversifying its sales channels can significantly increase sales and strengthen the company’s stability, while maintaining a high quality of service.
Success in a multi-channel environment rests on two pillars: the ability to reach new markets, and the guarantee of a consistent, satisfying customer experience across all platforms. Order and inventory management tools play an essential role in ensuring that every order is processed efficiently, that stock levels are up to date, and that customers stay informed throughout their purchasing journey.
