The Advantages and Challenges That Come With Multi-channel Selling

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The Advantages and Challenges That Come With
Multi-channel Selling Why you should be selling
on more than just one sales channel
Advantages

1. Exposure to more customers
2. The quality of the selling channels
3. Improving Brand awareness

Disadvantages

1. The risk of overselling
2. Time consuming
3. Improving product details

Exposure to more customers
The amount of people that chose to shop
online over in-store is at a record high.
This is expected to rise continuously
over the next few years. In a
study done by empathybroker.com it was
discovered that an estimated 51 of UK
consumers said they preferred shopping
online rather than in-store. If youre
just selling your products on one platform
youre therefore missing out on exposing
your products to potentially millions of
consumers.
Improving Brand awareness
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The more platforms you post your products
on, the more exposure they will generate.
This can have a great effect on any
personalised or brand specific products you
are trying to sell. The more people who see the
products, the more people seeing your brand name.
Although the benefits of this arent
limited to these type of products, if
youre trying to sell more common products
you can still increase your online profile
with more exposure. The increase in exposure
and sales will bring an increase in
product reviews, This will enable other
customers to see how good a product really
is. It will also allow sellers to review and
fix any criticism that comes of their products.
Which platform is best for you?
Amazon is often seen as the clear front
runner when it comes to this. After all
it is the largest online marketplace with the
most users. Therefore there is not much need
to try and sell it to you. Furthermore,
websites like eBay, are often seen as only
good for selling old, unwanted products.
This is untrue as actually, over 80 of
the products listed on eBay are new
listings. Another misunderstanding about eBay
is the idea all products have to auctioned
off. This can make potential sellers worry
they could lose out on profits. However, eBay
actually offers a Buy It Now feature which
allows products to be sold and listed for a
fixed price.
We have a whole separate blog on Amazons
battle for market control with eBay- read it
here
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Another popular website is Etsy, a site
that has a few more restrictions on what
sellers can list. However the unique products
that get sold on Etsy have resulted in the
website developing a loyal customer base
which often make repeated purchases from
the site. Both eBay and Etsy, while not as big
as Amazon still have millions of users who use
their sites as their main source of online
shopping. If youre only on one of these
sites you should highly consider expanding to
the others and potentially even more.
These selling channels are so popular, it
only makes sense to sell your products
online. The hard part is trying to
determine which platform is the right one
for you. You could just use whichever one
is the most popular, right? After all Amazon
has over 310 million active user accounts, so
why not just sell on there?
Well, the truth is that just because a
website is the most popular doesnt
necessarily guarantee youll get the maximum
number of sales for your products. Each
product will appeal to a different market.
It can be difficult to judge which market
will prefer which online platform, especially
as consumers tend to change which
platforms they use with each purchase.
Expanding to multi-channel selling
This is where multi-channel selling comes
in. Having your products listed on more
than one platform is the easiest way to
ensure your products are viewed by more
potential customers. This gives a higher
chance of your products selling. Once you
have began multi-channel selling you can start
getting a much better idea of which products
sell best on different platforms. However, this
opens up a whole other can of worms.
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The Challenges That Come With Multi-channel
Selling The risk of overselling
Unfortunately, multi-channel selling brings a
new set of challenges that have to be dealt
with. For example, now youve got your
products listed on several websites, how do
you ensure you dont oversell? You could
try and divide your stock between each of
your sales channels. But why risk limiting
potential sales this way? You should aim
to have the entirety of your available
stock listed across as many of your sales
channels as possible. In terms of profits,
the best way to do this would be to
update your stock across each platform after
each sale.
Time consuming
Keeping track of your stock is vital for
anyone trying to sell online. This can
prove to be very time consuming and can
prove very difficult to keep on top of. All
it takes is a few orders coming through
before you can update your stock and
suddenly you can find yourself unable to
fulfil an order.
This could potentially end with you
receiving a bad review. Another disadvantage
of having to dedicate so much time to one
aspect of your business is time management.
If you are constantly having to monitor
your stock levels then youre going to
struggle to
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find time to improve other aspects of your
business. This could result in stunting
any potential growth and potentially harming your
products sales rates.
Improving product details
Overselling isnt the only issue that can
arise from having to manually manage your
stock this way. Keeping on top of product
details across each channel can prove very
time consuming. Having to change the
description or price of an item seems
like a simple task. Yet doing it 3 or 4
times can become tedious and lead to
simple mistakes being made. Which could
potentially harm your products sales, after
all, how often do you buy a product with a
misspelled name?
A solution? Multi-channel Software
Managing all these issues can leave you
feeling like your entire day is spent
vigorously managing your stock. There are
solutions available to help you deal with
these issues
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and make managing your stock much easier.
OnePatch is the multi-channel sales tool
that could enable you to make changes to
your stock, inventory and orders across each
of your sales channels easily and quickly.
This will allow you to make these
changes just once and the OnePatch
system will automatically send the update
across your other channels. With your
ecommerce store management being taken care
of, youll find yourself with more time to
manage the other aspects of your business,
with the ease of mind knowing OnePatch is
taking care of your stock levels.
Not only does OnePatch help manage your
stock, but it will also enable you to view
all your various orders distribution
processes. This allows you to keep on top
of ensuring your customers receive their
purchases as quickly as possible.
On top of this you have the
onepatch dashywishyboard that makes
selling online amazing because you can see
how well you are doing on each platform
and see what your best Skus are. As a
result you can access a detailed analysis
of the many various components that ensure the
success in ecommerce.
Contact Us Contact Person - Richard Dunne
Designation - Co-Founder Address - 90 Seaward St,
Kinning Park City - Glasgow Zip - G41 1HJ Country
- United Kingdom
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Website - https//onepatch.com/ Ph No - 44 141
468 8370 Mail - hello_at_onepatch.co.uk