Results for 'selling online'

In the winter of 2007, Corinne Prevot was a 17-year-old high school junior who loved cross country skiing. One day, she picked up some colorful lycra fabric and started sewing nordic ski hats for herself and friends. The style of her hats was fresh and the patterns were cool. People started offering money for her hats, and demand grew at a steady pace until she had to hire seamstresses to help fulfill orders. A business was born, and Corinne's ski brand, SKIDA, was quickly becoming all the rage.

At first glance, online marketplaces like Amazon and eBay seem to be a creation of mutual benefit. Ecommerce store owners gain increased exposure for their products, and the marketplaces gain an expanded product range without having to increase inventory.

On closer inspection, the mutual benefits remain, but the reality is more nuanced. Should you expand your presence beyond your online store and start selling your products on Amazon and eBay?

The answer is... it depends. A marketplace strategy may be a boon for some retailers and a bust for others. There are a lot of variables that need to be taken into consideration, including the type of products you sell, the intensity of competition in your category, marketplace fees and restrictions, and so on.

There are, however, some pros and cons that apply across the board. In this post, we’ll explore those pros and cons, so you can make the decision of whether or not to sell on marketplaces well-informed as to the upsides and the downsides.

Pros

1. Increased Sales

The chief draw of selling on marketplaces such as Amazon and eBay is the scale of their online presence. Amazon alone draws nearly 85 million unique monthly visitors - that’s a heck of a lot of eyeballs! And those eyeballs can translate into higher sales volumes. According to an Amazon executive, sellers report an average 50% increase in sales when they join Amazon Marketplace.

2. Customer Acquisition

Nobody visits Amazon or eBay searching for your store. But they may be searching for - and discover - your products. Products they may not have discovered otherwise, or that they may have purchased from a competitor.

Once you’ve got a customer in the door, even if it is through a marketplace, you’ve got a chance to win repeat business through excellent service and fulfillment. This is especially the case if you’re selling products in a category that encourages frequent, repeated purchases such as hobby supplies or fishing gear.

3. Marketplace Infrastructure

Marketplaces are all about strength in numbers. This is as true for online marketplaces as it is for real world examples like farmers’ markets, shopping malls, and food trailer parks. The variety and all-in-one aspect of the marketplace can draw in lots of customers who prefer that kind of shopping experience. Online marketplaces also bring the additional layer of single-stream checkout and fulfilment support in order to create a seamless experience for buyers.

Cons

While there are some significant upsides to selling on marketplaces, there are also some drawbacks that need to be considered.

1. Marketplace Fees

Setting up shop on a marketplace can potentially supercharge your sales, but it also exposes you to another cost center - marketplace fees. Most marketplace fees are deducted as a percentage of each sale, and can vary from site to site and even category to category. Before selling your products on a marketplace, you’ll want to make sure you have a good sense of your margins and a firm understanding of the marketplace’s fee structure. In highly commoditized, low-margin categories, the numbers may just not add up. See fees for selling on Amazon, and fees for selling on eBay.

2. Marketplace Infrastructure

While the marketplace infrastructure has many advantages, it’s important to remember that it can cut both ways. Marketplaces don’t exist to help you, but to help themselves. They want the focus to be on the products, not the sellers. And that means they might restrict the degree to which you can brand your presence, communicate with customers, dictate what items you can and cannot sell, and so on. 

Additionally, there’s nothing to stop marketplace owners - in the case of Amazon, Sears, and so on - from “going to school” on third-party sellers, identifying popular products and stocking them themselves.

3. Keeping Inventory in Sync

A marketplace is essentially a second point of sale. And one that sometimes can’t be configured to talk to your shopping cart. In effect, both draw down the same inventory, but don’t sync with one another, making it challenging to understand your stock levels without lots of manual reconciliation. Fortunately, applications exist to help you aggregating orders from multiple sources and making sure your inventory stays in sync across all your stores. 

How to Choose a Marketplace

As you weigh the pros and cons of selling on a marketplace, it’s also worthwhile to consider which marketplace you would join. The tempting answer is “all of them!”, but each marketplace has its own system, its own processes and limitations and quirks. Learning to navigate those can take time you probably don’t have, so it’s best to stick to one or two marketplaces unless you know you can support more. 

Two of the largest and most well-known marketplaces are Amazon and eBay. Amazon’s Marketplace takes the sharper retail tack, and as a retailer itself Amazon provides tools to help third-party sellers become part of a seamless shopping experience, including “Fulfillment by Amazon”, which involves shipping your inventory in bulk to Amazon and letting them handle shipping.

eBay, on the other hand, is essentially a massive marketplace. Where Amazon focuses on the Amazon shopping experience, eBay offers seller tools and features that make it easier for you to feature your brand, as well as sell non-standard items.

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Article by Matt McDougall, Director of Marketing for Ordoro, a comprehensive order and inventory management solution for online retailers. Ordoro is available in the Shopify App Store and has a free 15 day trial. 

Global online music revenues are expected to rise by 7% this year to $6.3 billion.

Selling music online is big business, and so is selling everything that goes along with it. Ecommerce provides bands and musicians with an additional stream of revenue, in addition to traditional sales outlets like ticket sales, concert merch tables, and iTunes. Good news is, it's never been easier to sell music, apparel, and merchandise online. 

With Shopify you can easily create a beautiful online store to sell merchandise. You can also let your customers instantly purchase songs by using either Fetch, or Delivery - two of our digital download apps.

We've got quite a few musicians, bands, and even some music festivals selling on Shopify - here are a few of the most popular:

LMFAO Party Rock Clothing

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50 Cent SMS Audio

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Tori Amos

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Beck

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She & Him

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Foo Fighters

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David Choi

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Jimmie Vaughan

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Third Eye Blind

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Them Crooked Vultures

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Jimmy Eat World

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Lollapalooza

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CBGB

Austin City Limits

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The start of the year is the perfect time to plan for the year ahead. Consumers are looking toward holidays and special events up to a month ahead of time. To make the most of your campaigns and to ensure you have enough inventory, you should organize your marketing and merchandizing efforts with that in mind. If you're planning on selling things for Valentine's Day - start planning now! 

Brian Scates is moving from Dallas to San Francisco at the end of July and doesn't want to lug everything he owns over 1,500 miles across the country. So instead of renting a moving truck he's decided to sell the lot (including his $26,500 Audi A6), and start with a blank slate. Since he doesn't have a garage, Brian decided to open an online store to sell everything he owns. Smart. 

Every day we hear from several retail, brick and mortar stores looking to expand their reach beyond their physical storefront and sell their goods online. Shopify, coupled with Vend and Xero software, is the ideal solution for retailers looking to sell both online and offline, and easily keep track of it all.

Shopify gives you a beautiful looking online storefront, with a shopping cart allowing you to securely accept credit card orders online. Vend is a web-based POS (point of sale) and stock management system designed to work from anywhere on computers, phones and tablets. Finally, Xero is your bookkeeper. It automatically imports your sales from Shopify & Vend, connects to your bank to get all your bank transactions, plus handles your bills & expenses. This trio of software is all you need to run your store both online and offline.

Here are two video case studies that will show you how easy it can be for traditional retail stores to start selling online:

Taylor Stitch Case Study

Blue Chair Fruit Company Case Study

Here’s how to use Shopify, Vend and Xero together, just like in the above case studies:

1. Sign up for Shopify - Free 30 day trial
   

   Shopify powers your online store. Shopify is a hosted ecommerce platform that makes it incredibly easy to create a beautiful online store.

2. Sign up for Vend - Free 60 day trial
   Vend is your web based POS (point of sale) and stock management system. Vend connects perfectly with Shopify and Xero. Vend works just like your current (or a traditional) POS, but because it's a cloud based program, it works on any computer, iPad, iPhone, and works anywhere in the world (great if you want to sell at trade shows, farmers markets, or craft sales).


3. Sign up for Xero - Free 30 day trial
   Xero is your bookkeeper. Xero automatically imports your sales from Shopify & Vend, connects to your bank to get all your bank transactions, plus handles your bills & expenses. Xero is one of the world's leading online bookkeeping solutions and it's incredibly easy to use.


4. Connect All Three Applications
   Once you have setup an account using Shopify, Vend and Xero, head over to the Shopify App Store. Get the Vend Shopify App, and then the Xero Shopify App. Once your setup these two apps, all three solutions should be talking to each other and selling both offline and online should be a snap.

Most people don't want their online store to be a glorified vending machine. Insert coins, press A6, retrieve product. Unless you're selling chocolate bars or maybe a pack of gum, chances are your customers are looking for a higher quality shopping experience. Your online store should reflect your brand, your personality, and the products you sell. 

Danny Catullo is from Boardman, Ohio, and recently took his 3rd generation butcher shop online with his Shopify store Catullo Prime Meats: 

It’s no secret that Angry Birds is one of Shopify’s most successful stores. Angry Birds has swiftly flown into pop culture by means of an obsessively addictive game of ticked-off birds catapulting themselves into green pigs.

The game has been downloaded more than 50 million times and is the #1 selling iPhone app of all time. To say these feathery animals are successful would be an understatement. A recent article by cnet reports that Angry Birds owner Rovio has sold more than 2 million plush toys. Also of interest, more and more people are making in-app purchases.

Angry Birds approached Shopify at the end of October 2010 asking for an online store to sell their (still being sewn together) plush toys. The catch? They needed the store to be fully designed and operational before Christmas shopping began. That gave us about 3 days and change to put it all together. No big deal….

We assigned one of our top designers, Mark Dunkley (@markdunkley), who with steps of urgency jogged to a local Italian grocery store to buy pasta, tomato sauce and bottled water. He went home and worked around the clock, 48 hours straight, to get the Angry Birds store up and running. He denies drinking Red Bull, but we suspect otherwise. From day one, the Shopify Angry Birds Store has been a massive success.