Why Selling Through an Online Marketplace is Better for Your Local Business
The U.K. e-commerce market brought in more than £693 billion in revenue in 2019 and is only expected to grow bigger and bigger. In order to be a successful entrepreneur in today’s market, one must have access to modern technologies that can help them create their own product and sell it online. With so many potential customers in the market, it’s a great time for entrepreneurs to get started with selling products online. Today's sellers have tons of options when trying to make this happen! Some are more powerful than others, which is where online marketplaces make such a difference in today’s digital commerce world.
The internet has become an integral part of our everyday lives. Online marketplaces offer very distinct differences over the traditional way in which we would browse the web. There are several reasons for this.
If you only have a website:
Getting new customers does not work. Most customers are not that internet curious to look beyond the stores they usually buy from, so the chances for any seller to get new customers, unless they fund marketing to attract new customers, is close to zero.
New customers aside, trying to attract your existing customers to an online store is no easy task either. Most sellers already know this: to keep customers engaged and returning takes a lot of effort.
Creating an app can help, but it is expensive as well, and maintaining it to keep ahead of the new technologies is not a practical solution for most sellers. On top of that, users have begun to experience what is known as “app fatigue,” a phenomenon in which people have tried to scale back the number of unique apps on their devices in favor of a smaller number of more versatile apps that allow them to do lots of different things all in one place. Nowadays, the chances that a user will want to open a different app for each seller is far-fetched and unrealistic.
The competition out there is fierce, with Amazon-like solutions invading the market and offering a simple way for buyers to shop easily between multiple products, and get them delivered.
What are the positives of an Online Local Marketplace?
First and foremost, it is incredibly easy for the buyer. In one app, on the Web or on Smartphones, any buyer can find everything they need in one place.
Marketplaces make it easier to devote yourself to reaching new customers and expanding your current clientele. For sellers, they allow you to leverage the marketplace to acquire many new customers in a highly organic way. In practice, every customer who buys a product from a seller on the marketplace will see the other local stores, being able to browse their products too, purchasing them as easily as they would using any other marketplace while expanding the overall market share of that buyer for the community at large. In other words, every seller is doing marketing for all of the other sellers, and every buyer at one store becomes a potential buyer for all the others.
Buyers love “Amazon-like” services because they offer a simple way to shop and get deliveries. Having a similar experience for local shopping is in line with what buyers have come to expect today.
Amazon-like services are killing many of the stores near you, slowly and surely, because, until today, these stores did not have an alternative platform to sell their products online. Attacked from all sides, sellers were made to face this online competition, the pandemic catastrophe, and an onslaught of new shopping trends. LiveShop Marketplace is the only solution on the market that offers an alternative to these.
In one app, Sellers can manage all their online needs, gift cards, promotions, inventory, deliveries, order managements, subscriptions while offering their customers the latest technologies that the seller do not need to maintain, LiveShop takes care of all the infrastructure for each seller.
Cost
Online selling has many benefits for small businesses, including eliminating almost all of their traditional overhead costs, as well as providing far better access to customers. For these reasons alone, online sales have become incredibly popular; however, there are so many more elements that make this method attractive as an OnDemand solution dedicated to eCommerce - you can manage your sales and inventory from anywhere using only your smartphone. You can interface with your clients easily via the integrated messaging systems, you can promote new lines of products or run special sales easily to all your new and existing customers, you can track all your sales, and you can mine all of the data from every transaction to better understand what sells the most and who your best customers are.
24/7 Functionality
With an online Marketplace store, businesses can now offer their products 24/7 and never miss out on another sale again. You don't even need to worry about closing the business or taking time off for inventory management because it can all be done behind the scenes. You don’t even need to keep all the inventory in-store - you can make a sale online and then purchase any item that you don’t have in stock after you’ve already made the sale!
Competition
While joining a marketplace means that you will have competitors that are also on the same marketplace, the simple fact is that because so many more buyers will be presented with your products, every seller will simply acquire so many more sales regardless due to the increased exposure. Online marketplaces actually function opposite than sellers often expect; you are not necessarily competing against other sellers on the marketplace, but rather, the marketplace as a whole is competing for a percentage of a consumer’s total spending habits. With more businesses coming on board, consumers begin to see the marketplace as a whole as an increasingly viable substitute for other mediums of shopping, such as visiting a big-box store. It is also common to see customers begin to visit local stores in person after initially discovering the store online. People love to visit local places that they bought from, stopping in to say hi to the owner, taking a look at the decor, and sharing their good experiences with the products they bought. It is a completely new world of success, in-store and online.
The Easy Way
LiveShop is the only online marketplace and mobile application that allows local businesses to list their products for sale to allow buyers to shop locally. Buyers can choose to have their products delivered through a network of drivers picked up in-store or they choose to pick them up from the store themselves.
This platform has been recognized as the most powerful yet simple to use for sellers, which is key, as most sellers are not technically inclined, and did not get into their respective industries in hopes to become so. Sellers are generally focused on having a simple way to manage the different facets of their business while avoiding all of the exorbitant fees that many other online platforms require from them, so they can allocate that money towards serving their customers in the most effective and efficient way possible..
Most importantly, LiveShop genuinely cares about the ecosystems that it’s looking to build, we truly care about every seller’s success, along with every buyer's fantastic experience - because at the end of the day, this is our community and if everyone is successful, we can all then thrive together.