An interview with ecommerce marketplace specialists eCommeleon, discussing common challenges for retailers selling on 3rd party marketplaces.
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Tl;dr
- Common challenges for retailers selling on 3rd party marketplaces
- Handling data set-up and imports
- Automating data feeds and order management
More than 40% of online spending post-pandemic is taking place on ecommerce marketplaces, according to Wunderman Thompson’s Commerce Future Shopper Report. Marketplace platforms have been instrumental in the creation of new ways online buyers and sellers connect in a global marketplace, enabling seamless transactions for small businesses and large alike.
Selling on marketplaces brings unique challenges, as each has its own processes and product data requirements. In this episode we talk to marketplace commerce specialist eCommeleon, sharing advice on how to approach marketplace selling and how their platform reduces manual effort and improve data quality.
Tune in for practical insights from co-founder and MD Jesse Wragg into the decision-making process and implications for marketplace selling.
Discussion notes
- What are the common issues and challenges for business selling on ecommerce marketplaces that you’re addressing with your platform?
- How does the integration work for businesses on leading ecom platforms like Shopify, BigCommerce, Adobe, Salesforce etc. – are you app/connector focused or do you rely on platform APIs to push/pull product and other data?
- Data importing and cleansing is always a fun challenge – how clean and ready does a merchant’s data need to be and what automation tools/processes do you have to transform base data into marketplace ready data?
- How do you handle normalisation for key fields e.g, gender could be Men or Men’s & category trees vary across marketplaces?
- Marketplaces like Amazon have a surprisingly long list of data fields that can be used – how do you stay on top of what’s essential across different product categories & how does this speed up the process for merchants?
- How does your platform help merchants automate the generation of product level titles, descriptions etc. from their source data to avoid having to manually re-write for each channel?
- Each marketplace has its own unique data format requirements. You have different product data views for source vs. output to show what is being changed and why – can you talk us through this and what value this provides merchants?
- How do you handle validation errors – how can merchants quickly find issues and fix without having to manually check all the outputs?
- Deactivation is a key requirement to quickly remove items when there’s a problem e.g. OOS, recall – how do you handle marketplaces where there is no API to pull the listing?
- What support do you provide to help customers who aren’t as experienced in managing marketplace data feeds?
- Product data feeds: what are the key 3rd party channels that are currently supported and what’s in the pipeline?
- Some marketplaces have specific order management requirements, for example Zalando – what happens once an order is placed, what can your platform do to help customers?
- Where are you headed with the roadmap, what’s coming in 2023 and planned for 2024?
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