How do you get started on the marketing platforms with PIM in 2024?

Marketplaces represent a major development opportunity for retailers looking to reach a broad customer base. According to Digital Commerce 360, marketplaces are expected to generate more than $3,800 billion in business volume by 2024 (representing an increase of 9.95% on 2023).

This shows that marketplaces are not about to run out of steam, and that consumers are still keen to take advantage of the offers of these online platforms. You're probably familiar with well-known marketplaces such as Amazon, Cdiscount and Ebay. These three platforms rank in the top 3 of the 25 most popular ecommerce sites in France in 2020 according to an analysis by Semrush. These marketplaces thus represent a highly attractive development opportunity for e-tailers, whether on a specific market or several simultaneously.

In this article, we'll show you how to offer your products for sale on marketplaces, with the right tools.

Why take advantage of marketplaces?

There are several advantages for a company to launch on a marketplace:

1. Marketplaces are excellent platforms for rapidly increasing the visibility and awareness of your brand and products. They benefit from substantial traffic, giving the seller the opportunity to reach a wider or, on the contrary, highly qualified target audience, at a lower cost.

2. Speaking of cost, save money! The sky-high cost of creating ecommerce sites is driving many brands to turn to marketplaces. This solution enables even lesser-known brands to showcase and sell their products without incurring onerous costs.

3. Minimise risk-taking. Marketplaces are an opportunity to test new markets and assess the maturity of your business before investing in new market share.

4. Diversify your sales channels. If you have other sales channels, marketplaces are the perfect complement to your omnichannel sales strategy.

5. Go international. Online marketplaces know no borders. They give you the opportunity to conquer new markets in every corner of the globe.

Marketplaces offer many advantages and are aimed at all types of sellers, individuals and professionals. However, they need to be launched with a precise strategy in order to guarantee an optimal ROI and experience.

Sales profiles

Marketplaces are organized around the buyer-seller relationship. It is therefore possible to connect as either one or the other.

Professional sellers have their own dedicated platform, like Amazon Seller Central on the world's largest marketplace. This profile provides a complete back-office, helping e-tailers to manage their business directly on the platform.

They centralize a wide range of information such as : 

• Product sheets: offer your products on the platform and edit your product sheets directly from the marketplace back-office.
• Stocks: all orders and stock information are available directly from the platform. The aim is to provide you with an overview of your remaining and future stocks, as well as a daily, near-real-time view.
• Customers: numerous functionalities feed the marketplaces' back-office, enabling you to find out your customers' search intentions, analyze their experience of your products, gather their opinions, and much more.
• Support: the majority of marketplaces have a support system designed to assist merchants in their distribution process.
• Reporting: a wide range of reporting functions are also available, enabling you to accurately manage your marketplaces business, in particular via customized reports.

The products

There are several ways to go about selling on marketplaces. 

First of all, this modality can represent your entire e-commerce activity, i.e. your products are only available on one or more marketplaces. This avoids the need to develop an e-commerce site of your own. However, this can dehumanize your offer and affect the trust placed in you by visitors, who are unfamiliar with your company/brand.

Secondly, you can adopt a multichannel or omnichannel strategy, offering your products on several platforms: your website and your marketplaces.

It's very important to anticipate the model you want to adopt, as it doesn't require the same effort. Indeed, if you choose to sell only on marketplaces, your products can be uploaded directly onto the platform. On the other hand, if you already have a centralized sales offer on an online store, you need to synchronize your current offer in order to propose it on the marketplaces. This is called product syndication.

Content syndication

Product content syndication software enables you to manage the distribution of your products on marketplaces, as well as their communication on your channels of choice.

These tools help you automate the distribution of information from your product sheets across all your distribution and communication channels. They can be dedicated syndication tools, or represented by PIM (Product Information Management ) or DAM (Digital Asset Management).

This saves you an enormous amount of development time, making it easier to publish your product sheets on other platforms such as marketplaces, and limiting the risk of human error.

Why synchronize product information on marketplaces?

When you expand on marketplaces, you need to ensure that visitors to your product pages get the same level of information as those on your e-commerce site. This means that all the information must be the same, and must answer the same questions just as effectively.

The use of PIM software enables you to centralize all product information and modify it within a single platform. This information flow is then shared with all your distribution and communication channels. This quality control of your product information benefits your business, theoretically optimizing your conversion rates, regardless of the channels used.

Which marketplaces to choose?

The choice of marketplaces on which to develop your business depends solely on your objectives. Ask yourself the right questions, taking into account your offer and the strategy applied by competitors present on the market.

To answer the question "which marketplaces should I choose?", you need to adopt a user-centric approach. Which marketplaces are your customers likely to visit? You need to adopt a binary approach, taking into account both general and specialized marketplaces. 

The former generate a lot of traffic, albeit less qualified for your products. On the other hand, the latter, more focused on your offer, are more in line with your needs and can generate traffic more inclined to buy your company's products.

So you need to find the right balance between acquisition and conversion. Is it better to achieve high visibility with low conversion? Or attract a sample of highly qualified visitors to your product sheets on marketplaces?

How does PIM facilitate and optimize your presence on marketplaces?

Without a strategy, getting started on marketplaces can quickly become a tedious job! In addition to being highly competitive, each of them has its own criteria in terms of content, visual formats, compulsory or optional information... This can quickly turn out to be time-consuming, lead to errors and also discourage you.

In addition to this, investing in new marketplaces means thinking about :

• Further adapting/enriching product data,
• Comply with imposed formats on a case-by-case basis,
• Generate new formats for product photographs,
• Ensure updates when the product catalog is constantly evolving.

Fortunately, there's a solution PIM (Product Information Management) that will help you optimize and facilitate your experience on marketplaces.

PIM centralizes your entire product catalog. It is compatible with all marketplaces, and allows you to define upstream the rules for transmitting product data, adapting the product sheet to their requirements. This can be :

• A maximum number of characters for the text description,
• The choice of required or optional fields,
• Resizing the visuals according to the requirements of the marketplace,
• The opening of the catalogue is differentiated according to each selected marketplace.

Once these rules are in place, each modification made and validated on the PIM product sheets automatically updates their equivalents on each of the marketplaces. No need to worry about updating product sheets on every marketplace!

Even in a multi-brand environment, if your company manages a portfolio of several brands each offering different products on different marketplaces, PIM simplifies product data management by optimizing processes.

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