eCommerce has experienced unprecedented growth in the last year (>40% YoY) and has jumped to over 21% of all retail sales. COVID forced both businesses and buyers to look online to make their sales/purchases. This massive eCommerce expansion won’t go away once we move past COVID. SourceForge recently spoke with Dan Pope, Co-Founder of MarketplaceWorks about trends in eCommerce and how their platform can help businesses start to sell online quickly and easily or to expand their existing business across multiple sales channels – something that has been so critical for businesses this past year and moving into the future.
Q: How has 2020 and COVID changed the eCommerce landscape?
A: Small businesses throughout the world have faced multiple challenges due to this Pandemic. We have seen a meteoric rise in online purchases from the end user as they transition from traditional brick and mortar to purchasing from the security of their home. As states and localities introduced restrictions on brick and mortar retailers and buyers sought to avoid venturing into crowded spaces, we’ve seen massive growth in eCommerce. We are seeing owners try to transition their traditional strengths with local retail to having a greater online presence to offset falling revenue. Those businesses that have been able to make that transition quickly and easily, have been better able to weather the difficult retail economic climate and some are thriving.
Q: Do you expect the huge growth in eCommerce to endure once we move past COVID?
A: While we expect there to be eventual gains in traditional retail, both businesses and consumers are learning how much they can do online. Those learning won’t go away and we fully expect much of the eCommerce gains to be retained even post COVID. Businesses are learning that they will have greater resilience if they can ensure an online presence for their goods. Buyers that didn’t rely on eCommerce before COVID are now comfortable shopping online and have learned how to be a savvy online shopper in a short amount of time. Those learnings will persist.
Q: What are the most important marketplaces for a seller to participate in?
A: The traditional big 3, of Amazon, eBay and Shopify are where most businesses see the greatest client browsing for goods. It is also important to understand where your product mix works most effectively for those customers you care about. For example, we have taken the opportunity to partner with Reverb, a marketplace which is focused solely on the Musical Instrument product mix. While the dominance of marketplaces like Amazon and eBay control a vast percentage of general shopping and eCommerce, we expect there to be an expansion of specialty marketplaces like Reverb to meet the needs of knowledgeable, niche buyers.
Q: Why have your own eCommerce website?
A: Having your own website not only creates that authentic presence online that only you control, but gives you a level of legitimacy that savvy shoppers want to see, in particular when making larger purchases. Furthermore, while in most cases, sales on businesses eCommerce websites tend to lag those on the big marketplaces, the fees associated with your own eCommerce website tend to be far less than the larger marketplaces.
Q: What kind of businesses use the MarketplaceWorks application?
A: Our focus has been on trying to level the playing field for Small to Medium Businesses to compete against larger chains who have expensive custom built-in automation already. We provide a free or inexpensive entry point for businesses just getting started and ramp up to large more established businesses looking to increase their multi-channel automation. Typically our customers are trying to solve a few different problems: how do I efficient list my products across multiple marketplaces; how do ensure that my inventory is aligned between my different sales channels so I don’t sell what I don’t have; how do I efficient manage the orders from my different sales channels so I can efficiently ship, obtain tracking, and notify the marketplace and buyer that their order is on the way. MarketplaceWorks helps solve all these challenges.
Q: How does the MarketplaceWorks application help businesses that are new to eCommerce?
A: The team here is really hands on for everyone, whether small or large. We understand every business is not the same, thus we have developed a unique approach to configure the software to meet our customers’ needs. Furthermore, we find a lot of interest in our ability to integrate with various distributors or manufacturers, allowing our customers to venture into eCommerce as drop shippers – a low cost, low risk way to quickly build a business.
Q: How about businesses that are already selling online, how can MarketplaceWorks help them?
A: Our included product features are available to really anyone whether on the smallest or the largest plan. With our inventory and sales management capabilities you can rest assured that you will be able to focus on growing your business while keeping within the policies that each marketplace requires of you. Our hands on approach where you can actually talk to someone and figure out custom needs for your business is something that you usually do not get with technology companies. In addition, we help those more established sellers with some premium features like bundling/kitting, sale scheduling, and follow-up email templates with automation that allow them to more easily differentiate their offerings.
Q: What are three features in MarketplaceWorks that you get excited about?
A: We have a number of cool features to choose from that we continually enhance and add to. My favorite is our bundling capability, which we have found users taking advantage of in ways we had not anticipated. This feature allows businesses to more easily distinguish their products by bundling multiple products into a single offering that might be unique on a marketplace. MarketplaceWorks helps by allowing users to define these bundles and then build upon order while automatically managing and maximizing the associated inventory. Some customers have leveraged this functionality for their private labeling or to manage source materials for a product.
We also find that our support for drop shippers with integration with suppliers/wholesalers is what makes us different then most applications out there. Drop shipping is easily the quickest approach to increasing a business’s revenue with the least amount of risk.
Related Categories