Top Tips for Marketplace Management

Marketplaces and management of multiple Channels is a real challenge in the S.E. Asia Region because of the multitude of e-commerce platforms attracting significant traffic month over month.

According to Entrepreneur.com and Similar Web, in Indonesia five different e-commerce platforms rank in the top 50 of total online monthly traffic, including Tokopedia (37.6 million), Bukalapak (27 million), Shopee (15.3 million), Blibli (11.6 million) and Lazada (7.9 million).

Compare this to the United States, where e-commerce marketplace is much less fragmented: the three horizontal e-commerce marketplaces in the top 50 of total traffic in the country are: Amazon (1,500 million), Walmart (166.5 million) and Target (88.6 million).

Companies are thus wise to turn to Marketplace Management to simplify and optimize their online presence and commerce. Marketplace Management is the dynamic management of inventory, prices, order processing and shipping across multiple e-commerce platforms. Today, a multitude of software companies have made the foray to make it easier for ecommerce business to create a shopfront and sell on different platforms.

Choosing the Right Marketplace

Marketplaces are not new. They are the online shopping equivalent of a mall. The marketplace is the destination, the traffic aggregator. They put your products in front of people who would cost you a lot of money to be in front of otherwise.

But like Malls, not all marketplaces are the same. They don’t all attract the same crowd. Some are more customer friendly, some are more merchant friendly – though as Amazon merchants have found out – sometimes they are not your friend at all.

So start by thinking about your customer:

• What kind of products are they looking for?
• Are they looking for discounts and deals or are they looking for value?
• Do they prefer speed of delivery and convenience over price?
• Which generation are they? Are they on Facebook, Instagram, SnapChat or something else?

Channel Management. It’s still the Ps.

Do you have the right product? Are you selling your new season range on your own site and using marketplaces to get rid of overstocks or old products? What products are selling in other places around the world? What are the biggest selling products on Amazon for your category?

What is your pricing strategy? You don’t want to be the cheapest. But you probably don’t want to be the most expensive either. Can you use software to ensure that you are competitive and still making money?

Marketplace ecommerce doesn’t stop with the sale. You need to make sure you have the stock, that you deliver when you say you will, that the quality is what you said it was. You need to build up your reviews – because chances are that you are not the only seller and so you need a way to differentiate yourself.

It’s Complicated, but don’t Panic

As Ecommerce platforms add more functionality, channel management and marketplace management becomes easier. Some of the Product Managers are even paying attention to the S.E. Asian region and adapting their SaaS offers so they are not so US-centric.

Just another thing to ask your software vendors and suppliers – do they understand the region or are their coders sitting in California!