Direct Marketing International Online DMIonline.net ? Going to ...

Natalie Omany (pictured) has top tips to guide you.

Today, it is essential to have an ecommerce website and it also pays to consider adding other online sales channels. Here, we?ll look at the opportunities of online marketplaces, such as eBay and Amazon, which are proving to be among the most efficient and quickest ways to get sales and build traffic. ?

Changes in our shopping patterns over the years have shown that we?ll shop around for the best price possible and, since the birth of online marketplaces, we have witnessed a massive increase in transactions on eBay and Amazon.?

However, be careful in such marketplaces, as you are primarily competing on price and service alone.

eBay opportunities

For the UK, eBay?s small businesses turned over ?446million in total during 2010. A report last October on British million-pound eBay businesses, showed that more than 159 companies had surpassed the million milestone.?

eBay spends millions of pounds each year driving traffic to its site. For a small or start-up business, marketing on this level would be prohibitive, but you can benefit and save money by leveraging the big players to build your business. When you open your store on eBay, you gain immediate access to more than 86 million people in the UK and potentially 233 million globally, plus a wealth of tools and functionality.

Marketing tools

eBay offers its vendors promotional tools that include:

• Email marketing ? Send email newsletters to buyers to trigger repeat purchases
• Promotional flyers ? Create custom literature highlighting featured items or specials that you can include with all orders to trigger additional sales
• Search engine keyword management ? Customise your keywords in Manage My Shop to improve your page rankings
• Brand marketing material ? Promote your store and build your brand with customisable templates for business stationery, such as business cards or letterhead paper
• Cross-promotions ? This box appears after a buyer places a bid or purchases an item from an eBay seller. In fact, this box appears twice: once with your regular listings and again with a different assortment of items (if you want) after someone buys an item. Best of all, you get to select which categories items are selected ? from to display with your ?individual auctions.

As a store owner, you can customise just about everything that you do on eBay. A useful site for starting off is this one: Another good resource is Tamebay.

Getting ahead on Amazon

As with its rival eBay, the scale of opportunity is massive in a global market. Amazon.com today offers biggest selection of goods worldwide.

Using Amazon Marketplace, any business can compete directly with the giant itself and offer the same item in the search results. This is because anything sold on the platform has to have an international article number (EAN) barcode which will then be mapped to an ASIN (Amazon Single Identification Number). You input the EAN and, if this is already in the Amazon database, the system will return images, a specification, etc. It means you can list an item in 30 seconds, but you will be selling on price and service alone and you don?t have an opportunity to distinguish yourself in other ways.

Similar to eBay, if you sell on Amazon, you must provide a fantastic service. Therefore, it?s important to allow this when you set your prices. You must either be prepared to take a loss, while providing a brilliant service in the formative stages of your business, or you need to charge enough so you can provide a top service while making a profit.?

Amazon tools

Your Marketplace customers can give you valuable insight on what marketing techniques work best, because you can ask them how they heard about you via the feedback options available.?

Amazon also has social media sharing buttons for Twitter, facebook and email which allow buyers and sellers to share any product description with millions.

You can find a lot of help with marketing on the Amazon Marketplace here.?

Downsides

Amazon has one particular habit. It has access to the sales statistics for all its merchants. What better way to decide for itself what items it should start selling than to see what?s selling well for others?

We know of one merchant who had a particularly successful sales line. After a fairly short time, he was called by Amazon and asked where he sourced his stock ? and soon, Amazon was selling that product, too.?

One weak area with Amazon is customers don?t get a telephone number for human contact. Also, merchants do not get access to contact details for customers other than a physical address. So put a sticker on all deliveries in order to promote your business directly.

For an online business, it is fundamental to be part of the web economy and building an ecommerce marketing strategy that includes at least one, if not both the big online marketplace platforms, has to be a key consideration.

For more information about the opportunities of selling on eBay and Amazon, Actinic has a free whitepaper here.

Natalie Omany is customer support team leader and UK design co-ordinator for Actinic and has gained much ecommerce experience by running her own fashion accessories and jewellery site, Babi-Online.

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Source: http://dmionline.net/blog/2012/06/29/going-to-market-via-ebay-and-amazon/

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