Marketplaces act like a hive for ecommerce, where brands and manufacturers bring all types of products from all over the world under one digital roof. But just like the bees, it requires a tremendous amount of work to power a marketplace.
To ensure a sweet experience for consumers, marketplace sellers need to ensure all of their product listings include enriching content that adheres to each platform's unique requirements, as well as reflects the latest product updates. Maintaining consistency across these platforms and continuously optimizing listings for visibility demands constant attention.
Luckily, new solutions have emerged to allow brands to work smarter, not harder.
Understanding the market landscape of marketplaces
Before we go deeper into the challenges of managing product content across marketplaces, it's important to understand the various types of industry players that dominate the ecommerce landscape. Let’s look specifically at some of the marketplaces Productsup integrates with.
First, you have your obvious queen bees with a global presence, such as:
1. Amazon
- Unparalleled customer base
- Robust fulfillment network
- "Everything" store with diverse categories and optimal long tail
- AI-powered recommendation algorithms
→ Go to more info on how to increase revenue on Amazon.
2. eBay
- Renowned auction-style listings
- Diverse product categories
- User-friendly interface
- Established reputation
Then, you also have examples of marketplaces that focus on a specific region:
1. Kaufland
- Online storefronts in Germany (32M monthly visitors), Czech Republic and Slovakia
- 5,000+ product categories
- High volumes of products per seller
- Fair and transparent conditions for sellers with no hidden costs
→ Productsup + Kaufland: With Productsup’s API connection, create and update your product and inventory data directly.
2. Otto
- Second biggest marketplace in Germany (after Amazon)
- Over 11 million active users
- 2.9 million visitors per day
- High-quality sellers
→ Productsup + Otto: With our platform’s API, create and update products and offers on Otto.de. We offer order synchronization that allows you to import orders from Otto and send back shipment notifications automatically.
3. Bol.com
- 25M active users across the Netherlands and Belgium per month (Most visited marketplace in Holland as of Feb. 2024)
- 13.5M buyers in the past year alone
- Over 37 million products
- Renowned convenience
→ Productsup + Bol.com: Our API allows you to create, update, and delete/cancel offers on Bol.com, as well as import offers from the site. You can also import orders and send shipment notifications automatically (self-shipment or fulfillment by Bol/LVB).
While these are just a handful of channels worth noting, brands and manufacturers have endless options when it comes to marketplaces. In a perfect world, businesses would sell across every platform their customers are shopping, but in reality, that proves to be much more difficult.
Too much busy work
Consumers love marketplaces for their convenience and the wide variety of products offered from various brands. However, the backend work for sellers to provide a seamless shopping experience and make their products stand out from the millions of others requires a tremendous amount of work – most of which is tedious and costly.
Hurdles brands and manufacturers face when listing and advertising across marketplaces:
1. Consistency: Providing accurate information across product listings on separate marketplaces can be a daunting task. From product titles and descriptions to images and specifications, preventing discrepancies is essential for building trust and credibility with consumers.
2. Search optimization: With millions of products vying for attention, standing out in crowded marketplaces requires strategic optimization. Crafting compelling product titles, utilizing relevant keywords, and optimizing images across your entire product catalog can significantly enhance visibility and drive traffic to listings.
3. Compliance: Navigating the individual data and format requirements of each marketplace can pose significant challenges for sellers, especially in international markets where product content needs to be translated and localized for the region. Sellers that fail to meet these standards risk having their products disqualified, which creates extra work for teams and slows down time-to-market.
Keys to maintaining a buzzing marketplace presence
To manage product data effectively across various marketplace channels, brands and manufacturers should consider the following best practices:
1. Centralized management: Having the ability to manage your entire ecosystem of product data (not only marketplaces but also for all of the channels you sell on) is the only reasonable way to maintain a true omnichannel presence. Relying on several systems to source data, organize and clean it, distribute it, analyze it, and make regular updates prevents you from creating consistency across all channels and slows down your ability to get more products live. By condensing your operations into a centralized management view, you can streamline your product content’s journey to marketplaces.
Productsup integrates directly with the world’s largest marketplaces, including Amazon, eBay, Otto, Kaufland, Bol.com, and more. Combined with other solutions from our P2C (Product-to-Consumer) platform, brands and manufacturers can syndicate product content to not only marketplaces, but also to retailers, social channels, and industrial distributors.
2. Automated data synchronization: Leverage automation tools and integrations to synchronize product data near real-time across different marketplaces and backend systems. Not only does automation reduce manual effort, but it also minimizes the risk of data discrepancies and inaccuracies.
Productsup’s P2C platform leverages smart data automation to import, enrich, and share audience-tailored product information to various marketplaces worldwide. For instance, our Image Designer tool allows you to edit images in bulk, so updates to visuals appear across your entire product catalog on all of the marketplaces and retail platforms you sell on.
By embracing these best practices, brands and manufacturers can maximize their resources to reduce costs, create a compelling brand story to boost conversions, and expand to more channels and regions to grow revenue.
Learn more about Productsup’s syndication capabilities to global marketplaces through its Marketplaces PX offering. See how it fits into our other platform offerings here.
Giulia Meijnders, Senior Associate of Customer Marketing Netherlands at SC Johnson:
“The partnership with Productsup is facilitating improved alignment between GS1 standards and marketing content within our business operations. This collaboration enables better integration, ensuring that all relevant information is readily accessible on Bol.com. As a result, our products benefit from increased visibility and comprehensiveness for shoppers."