Selling Products On Online Marketplaces

Online marketplaces allow you to sell products quickly and easily with relatively low set-up costs and minimum effort. They can be a great place for new businesses to start before selling on a website or even before a brick-and-mortar store. 

Advantages of using online marketplaces to sell products:

• Online marketplaces can drive sales volume and help grow your business.
• They are easy to set up and use. 
• Selling on platforms such as online marketplaces will reach customers where they prefer to shop. Very often, purchasing decisions come down to convenience and price, so an online market place allows customers to compare prices and products from one single source. Why would you not pitch your products on platforms where your customers are shopping?
• Being with an established marketplace provides a level of trust between you and the buyer. 
• They are a great way to expand business internationally. Most retail businesses could expand their business by 10%-20% by selling internationally. One of the easiest ways to do this is through a marketplace. 
• Google Shopping can promote products to customers in nearly 100 countries. And for customer service, Google Translate works surprisingly well. However, sending orders overseas is more complex and riskier than sending items domestically. 
• Online marketplaces can offer cheaper marketing costs, compared to other sales channels.

Disadvantages of Online Marketplaces

• You can’t market to these customers directly. These aren’t your customers so you can’t send them marketing emails. 
• Marketplaces also charge high and sometimes complex fees for listing and transactions. Make sure you understand the fees before selling your products on marketplaces. 
• Online marketplaces may impose restrictions on how you can communicate with customers. 

eCommerce platforms like freewebstore give you more control. You can market directly to your customers if you have your own website. Plus if you want to reach more customers with techniques like Google and Facebook Ads, these require a transactional website to complete the sale. 

A single platform approach cuts off your business from a wealth of potential customers. If you depend too much on one traffic source then you are potentially putting too many eggs in one basket.

Using online marketplaces to attract new customers and then encouraging customers to visit your website for repeat purchases, where you can market/communicate directly to them and fees are reduced is a model definitely worth considering. 

If you have a website with freewebstore you can upload your products to Google Shopping, Facebook Shopping, and other online marketplaces.  

Freewebstore is the only free forever eCommerce platform that provides all the tools needed to build a free online store with product feeds that automatically upload your products to online marketplaces, and our dedicated support team is on hand every step of the way.