Marketplace giants proving to be unbeatable? Join them!

If you are a retail startup, gaining awareness is as important as making money. But to maintain or boost the sales of your products, you need to make sure that there is a constant purchase happening. For this, the easiest and the best option is to list your product on an online marketplace; a funnel to your own eCommerce website (if you plan to have any).

The online marketplace is a giant, let it win and see how it wins!

The online marketplace is and will always be your biggest competitor. There are millions of sellers like you, trying their best to pitch an identity. Make up your mind that you and your retail startup will never be able to beat such online marketplaces. The only best thing you can do is, figure out how your products are behaving on that marketplace. How other sellers are coming up with different strategies and how well can your strategies beat them. To be precise, when at an online marketplace, the battle is between you and the other sellers, whereas this giant is simply enjoying the bout.

A SWOT analysis can always be to your rescue. Acting as a mirror, it will help you to visualize the pros and cons of listing your product on such large marketplaces, amongst other sellers or competitors.

You need to analyze what individuality and uniqueness your listed product holds. If there are not many sellers available that sell the same product or are not even in the same category, you have excelled already. Make sure that you maintain it. Now, the biggest problem here is, your product or a selling idea is open to all the sellers. Where you are planning to publicize your business, there are possibilities that your idea is prone to be replicated.

Online marketplaces really don’t care about how small or big you are, but how huge they are and can actually be. Your business will eventually have monetary growth, but when it comes to branding, such marketplaces will never let you up.

Figure out the areas where you can be victorious. If another seller on the same marketplace is selling product ‘a’ at a specific cost and you can sell the same product at a lesser comparative cost, go for it. Penny to penny matters for customers, make it count! The marketplace will get benefited anyway, it doesn’t matter who amongst the many sellers is chosen by the customer.

As mentioned above, your product or business idea is inclined towards being replicated. There are chances that within a week or two, your product might not stay unique as it was before. Also, it might happen that even after putting in some expensive efforts to build your brand, your customers would regularly buy your products from the online marketplace and not your online storefront.

Create a brand niche and join the forces (Beardo’s experience at Amazon).

Whatever the game it might be, there are spectators, always! Create a playground wherein you’re the biggest player. If you hit the right spot, there will certainly be an immense traffic driven towards your product.

A few years back, a trend came into play - ‘say no to a shave, grow more beard’. People simply started growing beard and eventually discovered the issues a normal human being was facing with it. Came up an idea of beard grooming! Beardo was the brand that rocked it all. It then became a fashion statement and slowly a need for the ones who stuck to keeping a long and dense beard.

Beardo started it all from an online marketplace giant, Amazon, slowly came up with marketing campaigns and started driving the customers to its own website. Here, in the scenario mentioned above, with innovative marketing strategies, even a small seller, not beat but can equally compete huge marketplace giants.

Something happened with Beardo after its successful marketing campaign against Amazon…

Beardo’s sales at Amazon fell drastically after people found astounding offers on its own website. Being a newbie, Beardo couldn’t hold on to it, and Amazon found the right time and the best shot to play. Beardo started getting competitors, and they boomed the marketplace. Eventually, after all the expensive marketing campaigns and superstar brand ambassadors, Beardo had to accept that if it can make business, Amazon is the place for it. But yes, after everything that was invested, Beardo made itself worthy enough to win the trust of an extremely trending market, concreting a never dying position.

In a recent post, Beardo’s 45% stakes were acquired by Marico to give it a global reach. Marico already sells Set Wet products under its name.

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An internal ‘secret’ relationship with the online marketplaces…

Online marketplaces like Amazon, eBay, etc. have made it compulsory for the sellers to ship their ordered products in the marketplace’s own packaging material. Now, they really don’t care how the product is packed inside. Quality is not the question here, because that along with service are the key factors on which the seller’s reputation is based. A seller lists a product on the marketplace for two important reasons: to sell the product and to rise up as a brand.

To build a ‘secret’ relationship with any marketplace, a seller should always showcase a brand identity in the internal packaging.

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There should be one single focus, the moment your customer opens the marketplace’s packaging, your brand should be the first thing that could see. Get your shipping stuff designed in the best creative way possible. Show some discounts or give out some coupons codes, in short, lure the customer to your own website. Try, it really works!

An out of the box advantage

Your product marketing efforts will all be optimized! Amazon and other such marketplace giants offer PPC marketing tactics like Google to boost specific businesses or sellers. There are different ways to utilize such options, totally depends on the budget you have planned and are willing to spend to highlight your brand.

So, in the end…

It all depends on how well you can face such online marketplace giants, instead of planning to win. Rather than guts, gather smartness, and the game is yours!