Why Marketplace Sellers Need Their Own ECommerce Websites
eCommerce is expected to grow from $4.9 trillion in 2021 to $7.4 trillion by 2025. While much of that will come from famous marketplaces, your own online store website can still be very useful.
A webstore is an owned channel that enables eCommerce merchants to boost profit margins and conversions. Having your own website diversifies your online presence and prevents your business from being at the mercy of a single marketplace's ever-changing regulations.
Your store can gain credibility by selling on large marketplaces with large customer bases, but after you've reached a certain level of success, it's time to build your eCommerce website. Migrating to other platforms, even your own, is a natural and necessary step in your business's development. It allows you to take control of your business and protect it against platform restrictions and suspension.
Control Of Your Brand Equity
As you expand to other platforms, moving away from selling as a third-party seller on Shopee or Lazada means gaining more control over your business. Customers will know they're buying from you, not an eCommerce marketplace if you establish your brand on your own website. Because you own the channel, you have more options to increase brand loyalty. Your brand equity is under your control.
Building a customer base of people who know and trust you, who expect particular standards of service or quality from you, and who will tell their friends and family about you is possible when you brand your store. Because you have a concrete, well-defined, and concentrated online presence to direct customers to, having your eCommerce webstore makes branding easier and more dependable.
Reduced Risk
If your entire business is built on a single platform, you risk losing it at any point. Even healthy accounts with no red flags are occasionally suspended by Amazon, and while those accounts are frequently restored, the company still loses money and consumers while they are offline. Moving from a single channel to an omnichannel strategy becomes critical for business.
Moving your eCommerce business to an omnichannel strategy reduces risk, ensuring that even if something goes wrong, your firm remains secure and profitable. Furthermore, if your existing marketplace clients are familiar with your business, they can search your website and make a purchase directly from you. Owning your store opens up multiple touchpoints for customers to reach your business.
Encourage Loyalty & Brand Recognition
Repeat sales are one of the main drivers of eCommerce growth, simply because selling to an existing consumer is easier and 20% less expensive than acquiring new customers. Because you can develop your eCommerce store as a source of customer satisfaction and value, selling from your own website gives you additional opportunities to create new consumer touchpoints and repeat business.
As studies show that repeat consumers account for around 65% of all sales, each of these strategies can significantly improve your potential to drive sales. Customer contact, on the other hand, is frequently prohibited on marketplaces such as Amazon, where you're not allowed to utilize branded packaging inserts or send emails beyond what's required to provide a good customer experience.
Reduced Cost Per Sale
Any marketplace where you sell will charge you a fee for using their platform. While creating and managing an eCommerce online store is costly, you may rapidly find that it saves you money or pays for itself as you increase your sales volume.
You'll save on seller marketplace fees and be able to lower your average cost per sale across all channels if you can reach a consumer directly through your own website.
Improved Search Marketing
You can utilize a variety of marketing techniques that you couldn't perform with a marketplace.
Both SEO and SEM, for example, can increase traffic and customers to your store. Rather than having to optimize for search within a marketplace, you may optimize for search for your own website. On a website with millions of other listings, optimizing marketplace listings for search will only get you so far.
When you open your own eCommerce store, you can use blogs and videos to boost traffic, generate leads, and strengthen relationships with current customers. All of these activities have the potential to generate revenue over time.
Conclusion
Every online merchant should have their own website. You'll be able to increase sales, enhance branding, and cut your cost per sale with the correct approach. Your website will increase consumer trust and awareness, boost loyalty and retention, assist buyers in making smarter decisions, and increase sales across all of your existing platforms.
Setting up an omnichannel retailing strategy, however, is not without its difficulties. You can run into issues like inconsistent product listings, incorrect inventory levels, and a time-consuming manual order fulfilment procedure across platforms.
These difficulties are eliminated by OMNA. OMNA allows you to publish listings from a central database, ensuring accuracy and avoiding mistakes. OMNA also imports orders from Shopee and Lazada into Shopify, allowing you to fulfil them centrally. Furthermore, the real-time inventory sync tool automatically updates your inventory levels across all channels, taking into account any units sold. OMNA helps you streamline your omnichannel operations across your website and marketplaces as a whole.