When it comes to standing out in the eCommerce world, waiting too long to properly onboard with online marketplaces can quickly put you behind the competition and significantly hinder your business’s ability to scale.
Integrating with multiple marketplaces can take months – time you don’t have if you want to put your products at the forefront of your customer’s shopping experience. The onboarding process can be tricky for sellers because of steps like product cataloging and activating references. These tasks can be extremely time-consuming, especially when your product data is located in various sources.
There’s a way to onboard marketplaces quickly and effectively!
In this post, we’ll take a look at the features, techniques, and requirements you need to effectively onboard online marketplaces. You’ll learn how to overcome common challenges with marketplace integration, and get order management tips to seamlessly showcase your products in front of more qualified customers.
Steps to consider when onboarding a marketplace
Before you begin to integrate a marketplace, there are a few things to consider.
- Creating a Seller Account
Of course, you will need to set up an account, starting with inputting all of the key information for security and verification, such as Know Your Customer (KYC) or Know Your Business (KYB). You may also need to submit specific documentation that allows the marketplace to verify the I.D. of you, the seller.
- Product Cataloging & Activation
This is a large part of the process, where the marketplace utilizes its rich product data from various sources to display your product feeds accurately. To have this properly set up, you’ll need to make sure the data you submit for your feeds is up-to-date and detailed. The criteria in which a marketplace uses the data can vary quite drastically depending on which marketplace you are onboarding. Some marketplaces, like Amazon, can be particular with their integration criteria.
- Customer Relationship Management
Customer retention and loyalty are synonymous with your dispute management and resolution. Before integrating a certain marketplace, it’s a good idea to set up a dispute management process and to understand how a specific marketplace will mediate if a resolution can’t be achieved.
- Financial Management
It’s always beneficial to determine and fully understand the commission rates attributed to a given marketplace per sale and proactively map out an invoicing process. Again, a leading technology partner with a robust solution is key to having this (and the previous steps) taken care of to avoid headaches or confusion later on throughout the process.
- Order Workflow Management
The goal is to achieve an integrated fulfillment process, eliminating the need to use various marketplaces to ship products to customers manually. This can be a difficult task, especially with high order volumes. However, by working with a leading technical partner, this stage can be managed automatically, freeing up your time to focus on your store’s marketing instead of the back-end work.
The importance of order management
Order management is a crucial part of the entire eCommerce process and deals largely with the specific actions involved in successfully getting your products into the hands of your customers.
This can range from things such as:
- Warehousing and physical storage space
- Unified management of the order life cycle
- Secure and broadband connections for reliable product delivery
With a sophisticated and well-rounded order management system in place, you can ensure that the entire shopping experience, from browsing to receipt of goods, is unparalleled. The experience your customers have should strengthen your overall brand positioning and reputation.
Common challenges with marketplace onboarding and how to overcome them
You’re now one step closer to successful integration. Still, you might encounter challenges during the onboarding process
Many of these challenges depend on what type of products you are selling. Let’s look at what some of these challenges are, what they mean, and how to overcome them so that you can be on your way to selling your products in your marketplace of choice.
- Normalizing data
Normalizing data is the process of standardizing and cleansing data so that each piece of product data, from title, color, and size, appears in a uniform and consistent way across every touchpoint.
Solution: A robust solution, like Highstreet.io, offers bulk edits and can apply changes at scale so that no new incidents arise.
- Organizing data for specific brands
With multiple channels requiring their own set of unique criteria, using a “one size fits all” approach to uploading product data won’t do the trick. On the other hand, the ad hoc approach of tailoring products for certain markets will take up way too much time.
Solution: Provide better-segmented product data at the integration stage with an automated process from a leading marketplace integration solution, like ours.
Other challenges that may arise throughout the onboarding process can range from managing inventory information or implementing the rapidly changing information associated with special offers and promotions.
How to effectively onboard and integrate with marketplaces
The Highstreet.io platform makes the entire process simple and seamless, saving you a significant amount of time with product feed management and marketplace integration.
By understanding the challenges sellers and merchants are facing, our experts in product feed and marketplace onboarding requirements are can help you throughout the whole process.
Here’s what we can do for you:
- Optimize Product Data: With optimized product data, you’ll have peace of mind knowing that every product in your product feed is correctly labeled, titled, and accurately described so that they have high discoverability and therefore maximize conversions.
- Invoicing: By taking a proactive approach and ensuring that the correct invoicing details are in place before they become issues, integrating with Highstreet.io means having seamless processing and invoicing where it is available.
This allows you to avoid any issues or setbacks that can derive from a poorly integrated marketplace so that you can focus on marketing your products rather than worrying about the integration process.
- Up-to-date stock & inventory: Finally, by being highly responsive in real-time, Highstreet.io allows you to only sell in-stock items with automatic synchronization of your store inventory as you receive orders.
Streamline the entire marketplace onboarding process while effectively overcoming specific issues